OpenAI announced yesterday that its Deep Research tool, an AI agent for complex data collection and analysis using ChatGPT and web search, is now available to users of all paid ChatGPT plans.
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Instead of a short answer to a question, Deep Research provides detailed and structured information collected from several sources with full links and an explanation of the logic of reasoning. Collecting and systematizing information takes from 5 to 30 minutes. Deep Research is based on a special version of the OpenAI o3 reasoning model, trained using the Reinforcement Learning method, which is combined with Internet search.
Subscribers to ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise, and Edu plans can submit ten research queries per month. Previously, OpenAI Deep Research was only available to ChatGPT Pro users who pay $200 per month — at the time of the AI agent’s release, they could submit 100 queries per month, now this number has been increased to 120.
OpenAI competitors Google and Perplexity have already offered tools for conducting deep research in web search — these services have the same name and also generate long reports, but they are available to a wider range of users. Last week, Google opened up its research AI agent to all users of Gemini Advanced — you can subscribe to this for $19.99 per month, as well as ChatGPT Plus.
Tech companies are counting on deep research tools to incentivize consumers to sign up for expensive AI subscriptions. OpenAI, however, is already exploring how deep research could threaten the public if the tool is abused to spread misinformation.