ChatGPT Pro users can get their hands on OpenAI's second AI agent, following the release of Deep Research on February 2nd. Deep Research is an AI-powered tool that can search, crunch, and parse massive amounts of data, generating detailed, citation-backed reports from those insights.
Following the eruption of Deepseek, the move comes in a bid to fortify OpenAI's position as a market leader in the space. Their first AI agent, Operator, was released January 23rd, and their latest reasoning model, o3-mini, was made available February 1st.

Deep Research in action (Credit: OpenAI)
As shown in a recent demo, using the tool is straightforward - select 'deep research' in ChatGPT, enter your query, and attach files if needed. From there, it browses, analyzes, and compiles information over 5-30 minutes, then delivers a thorough report with sources and key takeaways.
The tool is designed for complex inquiries in fields like finance, science, policy, and engineering - but also works for detailed consumer research. With an emphasis on precision and reliability, a key advantage is its ability to find niche, hard-to-access information while limiting the infamous hallucinations associated with conventional language models.

The name is popular in AI at the moment (Credit: Google)
OpenAI's Deep Research shares the same name as a similar feature offered by Google Gemini. Google's offering targets a more general consumer audience, citing grad student researchers and small start-ups as examples of use cases. It also gathers data over a few minutes, rather than the half-hour time horizon offered by OpenAI.
Whether Deep Research and OpenAI's first agent, Operator, make their way into everyday lives is still up in the air. But with competition heating up, OpenAI isn't slowing down anytime soon.