OpenAI Launches “Deep Research” Agent For ChatGPT

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The big question is, just how precise is ChatGPT deep research? AI is imperfect, after all. It’s prone to hallucinations and other types of errors that could be particularly harmful in a “deep research” scenario. That’s perhaps why OpenAI said every ChatGPT deep research output will be “fully documented, with clear citations and a summary of [the] thinking, making it easy to reference and verify the information.”

The jury’s out on whether those mitigations will be sufficient to combat AI mistakes. OpenAI’s AI-powered web search feature in ChatGPT, ChatGPT Search, not infrequently makes gaffes and gives wrong answers to questions. TechCrunch’s testing found that ChatGPT Search produced less useful results than Google Search for certain queries.

To beef up deep research’s accuracy, OpenAI is using a special version of its recently announced o3 “reasoning” AI model that was trained through reinforcement learning on “real-world tasks requiring browser and Python tool use.” Reinforcement learning essentially “teaches” a model via trial and error to achieve a specific goal. As the model gets closer to the goal, it receives virtual “rewards” that, ideally, make it better at the task going forward.

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More From an In-Depth Blog Post (with Examples) From OpenAI

Deep research is built for people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, policy, and engineering and need thorough, precise, and reliable research. It can be equally useful for discerning shoppers looking for hyper-personalized recommendations on purchases that typically require careful research, like cars, appliances, and furniture. Every output is fully documented, with clear citations and a summary of its thinking, making it easy to reference and verify the information. It is particularly effective at finding niche, non-intuitive information that would require browsing numerous websites. Deep research frees up valuable time by allowing you to offload and expedite complex, time-intensive web research with just one query.

Deep research may take anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes to complete its work, taking the time needed to dive deep into the web. In the meantime, you can step away or work on other tasks—you’ll get a notification once the research is complete. The final output arrives as a report within the chat – in the next few weeks, we will also be adding embedded images, data visualizations, and other analytic outputs in these reports for additional clarity and context.

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