Published 19:58 IST, February 4th 2025
Deep Research ChatGPT Tool - What Is It?
OpenAI plans to improve Deep Research by making it more autonomous and capable of handling deeper, more complex tasks.

In its first major release since the DeepSeek controversy, OpenAI introduced a new AI tool called Deep Research on February 2, 2025. This AI-powered research assistant is designed to gather, analyze, and summarize information from the web, creating reports at a research analyst level, according to OpenAI.
Deep Research's capabilities were demonstrated by OpenAI in a YouTube demonstration video. According to The New York Times, the business also gave a private demonstration of the AI technology to US senators and other government representatives in Washington, DC, last week.
“Through that training, it learned to plan and execute a multi-step trajectory to find the data it needs, backtracking and reacting to real-time information where necessary,” OpenAI claimed in a blog post published on Sunday.
How Deep Research Works
Unlike traditional AI models that generate responses instantly, Deep Research takes 5–30 minutes to conduct thorough research. It follows a multi-step process, browsing the internet, reading web pages, extracting key insights, and refining its approach. It can also process PDFs, images, and tables while maintaining citations.
OpenAI claims that Deep Research is capable of:
Market research and industry analysis.
Finding scientific research papers and academic sources.
Identifying forgotten media content based on vague descriptions.
Generating structured reports based on real-time web data.
Deep Research: Performance & Limitations
Deep Research is built on a fine-tuned O3 reasoning model and achieves new benchmarks in knowledge retrieval and reasoning tasks. However, OpenAI acknowledges its flaws, stating that:
It may struggle to distinguish authoritative sources from rumours.
It often fails to convey uncertainty accurately.
It is compute-intensive, requiring more processing power for longer tasks.
Deep Research: Subscription
Deep Research is currently available only on the web version of ChatGPT for Pro users under a $200 per month (₹16,950 approx.) subscription. Users must select the ‘deep research’ tab before entering their queries. Once the tool starts, a sidebar appears, summarizing steps taken and sources used, with the final report delivered in chat.
However, Deep Research is not yet available in the UK or the European Union (EU) due to regulatory concerns.
OpenAI plans to improve Deep Research by making it more autonomous and capable of handling deeper, more complex tasks. It is expected to roll out to Plus, Team, Education, and Enterprise users in the future, further expanding its reach in AI-driven knowledge work.
Updated 19:58 IST, February 4th 2025