Tech giant OpenAI has unveiled a pay-for-access tool called ‘deep research’, which synthesizes information from dozens or hundreds of websites into a cited report several pages long. The tool follows a similar one from Google released in December and acts as a personal assistant, doing the equivalent of hours of work in tens of minutes.

OpenAI announced this week its AI research assistant, which it calls “ deep research .” Powered by OpenAI’s o3-mini model (which was trained to use trial and error to find answers to complex questions), deep research is one of OpenAI’s first attempts at a real “agent” that’s capable of following instructions and working on its own.

“What you get from deep research is a comprehensive, fully cited research paper, essentially something that an analyst or an expert in a field might produce to you,” OpenAI Chief Research Officer Mark Chen said during a demo of the new deep research tool.