OpenAI is announcing a new AI “agent” designed to help people conduct in-depth, complex research using ChatGPT, the company’s AI-powered chatbot platform, TechCrunch reported.
Appropriately enough, it’s called deep research.
OpenAI said in a blog post published Sunday that this new capability was designed for “people who do intensive knowledge work in areas like finance, science, policy, and engineering and need thorough, precise, and reliable research.” It could also be useful, the company added, for anyone making “purchases that typically require careful research, like cars, appliances, and furniture.”
Basically, ChatGPT deep research is intended for instances where you don’t just want a quick answer or summary, but instead need to assiduously consider information from multiple websites and other sources.
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.”
OpenAI reported: Today we’re launching deep research in ChatGPT, a new agentic capability that conducts multi-step research for complex tasks. It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours.
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. Powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model that’s optimized for web browsing and data analysis, it leverages reasoning to search, interpret, and analyze massive amounts of text, images, and PDFs on the internet, pivoting as needed in relation to information it encounters.
The ability to synthesize knowledge is a prerequisite for creating new knowledge. For this reason, deep research marks a significant step toward our broader goal of developing AGI, which we have long envisioned as capable of producing novel scientific research.
Engadget posted: There’s no two ways about it, there’s a newfound sense of urgency at OpenAI. Two days after releasing o3-mini to the world, the company made a surprise announcement on Sunday evening, revealing Deep Research. The new feature allows ChatGPT to find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of websites and online sources to create reports “at the level of a research analyst.”
On top of the usual text questions, users can upload files, including PDFs and spreadsheets, when prompting ChatGPT in this way. The chatbot will then take “anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes” to complete an answer, a side panel documenting the agents progress and citations as it works.
In my opinion, I can see why some people want to use the capabilities of OpenAI. That said, I have concerns about the AI creating “hallucinations”.