The world of AI is exploding. A few days after the introduction of the Chinese DeepSeek, OpenAI responded with making its advanced reasonong model o3 available to its users. And this is not all! Today, ChatGPT launched a new sophisticated model called Deep Search which has the capabilities of an expert research analyst.
ChatGPT Deep Research is basically an AI agent that can function autonomously to “plan and execute a multi-step trajectory to find the data it needs, backtracking and reacting to real-time information where necessary.”
The way it works is similar to mainstream ChatGPT but with more advanced reasoning powers. You simply input your prompt and the model will respond in the form of a concise and comprehensive report synthesized from hundreds of resources across the web. And on the righthand side bar, you get to see a summary of its reasoning process including citations and references.

Source: OpenAI
Deep search is powered by OpenAI’s o3 model which is especially “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 reaction to information it encounters.”
You can prompt the new Deep Search model using text, images, or you can upload your documents and the model will read and analyze everything and provide comprehensives responses that take bewteen 5 to 30 minutes. This is definitely a long wait time but OpenAI is working on improving its response time. Also, in the upcoming weeks, OpenAI will be introducing embedded images, charts, and other analytic outputs in the reports Deep Search provides.
As of right now, ChatGPT Deep Search is only available for Pro users with up to 100 queries per month. Plus and Team users will be provided access next!
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Once available to all users, Deep Research, I believe, will be an invaluable AI tool to help you with various research related tasks from working on literature reviews to analyzing academic papers, summarizing key findings, generating citations, identifying gaps in existing research, and even brainstorming new research questions.