OpenAI's launch of Deep Research, an AI agent designed to create in-depth report, is the latest launch in a bid to make the $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription worth it.
The launch of Deep Research, a tool that can create in-depth research complete with citations, can create a report in anywhere from 3 minutes to 30 minutes.
Deep Research, assuming it can create reports that are analyst quality, could be handy for various industries in finance, academics, science and policy. It can also be handy for purchases of high-ticket items--something OpenAI notes in its blog post.
When you couple Deep Research with OpenAI Operator, which also launched on ChatGPT Pro, the $200 per month subscription starts to look more palatable based on time, or what you'd pay for an ala carte report.
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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman noted that ChatGPT Pro isn't profitable yet, but the offering is young and frankly the company hasn't made the ROI case. Operator was a nice demo, but it's unclear whether it's worth the time savings.
However, Deep Research may make more sense to justify the subscription--even though I expect Google to do something similar soon.
Bottom line: You may not need lower level analysts anymore across multiple industries.
Assuming Deep Research can produce quality reports, the industries disrupted will be extensive. IT, Wall Street, legal, healthcare and other areas that deploy junior analysts won't need them. Can OpenAI Deep Research replace Bloomberg? How about that Gartner subscription? How about paralegals? Sell-side analysts on Wall Street? Management consultants? That promising college grad? Me?
OpenAI said:
"Deep Research was trained using end-to-end reinforcement learning on hard browsing and reasoning tasks across a range of domains. 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. The model is also able to browse over user uploaded files, plot and iterate on graphs using the python tool, embed both generated graphs and images from websites in its responses, and cite specific sentences or passages from its sources. As a result of this training, it reaches new highs on a number of public evaluations focused on real-world problems."
ChatGPT Pro users get access to Deep Research with a limit of 100 queries per month due to the reality that the model is "very compute intensive."
There is a rather large caveat worth noting.
"Deep research unlocks significant new capabilities, but it’s still early and has limitations. It can sometimes hallucinate facts in responses or make incorrect inferences, though at a notably lower rate than existing ChatGPT models, according to internal evaluations. It may struggle with distinguishing authoritative information from rumors, and currently shows weakness in confidence calibration, often failing to convey uncertainty accurately. At launch, there may be minor formatting errors in reports and citations, and tasks may take longer to kick off. We expect all these issues to quickly improve with more usage and time."
However, OpenAI is getting closer with ChatGPT Pro depending on quality. If you spend on research reports, the $2,400 a year subscription to ChatGPT Pro can be justified quickly.
