OpenAI Debuts Tool to Conduct ‘Deep Research’ Online

OpenAI has debuted an AI tool dubbed “deep research” capable of performing multi-step online research.

“It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours,” the company wrote in its Sunday (Feb. 2) announcement.

“Deep research is OpenAI’s next agent that can do work for you independently — you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst.”

According to the company’s announcement, deep research is powered by an iteration of OpenAI’s upcoming o3 artificial intelligence (AI) model that is designed for web browsing and data analysis. When prompted by users, the company’s ChatGPT chatbot will find, analyze and synthesize online sources like images, text and PDF to create a report.

OpenAI says this tool is designed for people doing “intensive knowledge work” in fields like finance, engineering and policy, though it can also be useful for “discerning shoppers looking for hyper-personalized recommendations” for products requiring research like cars or appliances.

OpenAI also noted that deep research is a work in progress and has its limits, and that the tool “may struggle with distinguishing authoritative information from rumors, and currently shows weakness in confidence calibration, often failing to convey uncertainty accurately.”

The announcement follows news from this weekend that OpenAI was reconsidering its shift to a closed-source development approach.

This rethink comes after DeepSeek’s release of a lower cost open-source AI model, executives said during a Reddit “Ask Me Anything” event last week.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said during the event that his company needs to “figure out a different open-source strategy.”

Altman added that not everyone at OpenAI shares that view and that figuring out the strategy is “not our current highest priority,” per a Seeking Alpha report.

News about DeepSeek shook both Wall Street and Silicon Valley last week, with the Chinese company’s model appearing to perform the same functions as many American AI models at a sliver of the cost.

“Artificial intelligence has reached a critical inflection point. The industry stands at a crossroads where escalating costs, environmental concerns, and innovation appear intertwined, threatening to stifle accessibility and adoption,” Gokul Naidu, a consultant for SAP, told PYMNTS last week. “Enter DeepSeek-R1, the model that’s turning heads in Silicon Valley and beyond for proving that high performance and affordability aren’t mutually exclusive.”