Casey Newton tests the new ChatGPT deep research tool and is impressed
Tuesday, February 4, 2025
… deep research is available only to subscribers of ChatGPT’s $200-a-month Pro tier. (Users are limited to 100 deep research queries a month, reflecting the high cost of the computation involved; for now, it’s accessible only on the web.) To use it, you type out your query as usual in the ChatGPT chat box and then click the “deep research” button.
ChatGPT then analyzes your query and asks you follow-up questions. When I asked for a report on a current subject of interest – how publishers can benefit from the Fediverse – the bot asked me four clarifying questions, such as whether I was looking from the perspective of a legacy publisher or a digital-only outlet, and how technical it should get in its analysis of the tradeoffs between using two different federated protocols. I answered those questions, and deep research got to work.
Like DeepSeek, OpenAI’s deep research exposes some of its chain of thought as it answers your query. This let me see some of the websites that the agent was visiting, what conclusions it was drawing from them, and how it was beginning to organize its reasoning. Five minutes later, my 4,955-word report was available. (Read the whole thing here.) It outlined how the Fediverse can help people find new news sources; offered real-world examples of how sites like The Verge and 404 Media are leaning in to federation; explored different monetization strategies and described the trade-offs involved with each; and analyzed the pros and cons of building on the two main federated protocols.