OpenAI’s surprise new o3-powered ‘Deep Research’ mode shows the power of the AI agent era

In case you missed it in favor of the Grammy Awards last night, OpenAI surprised the world late Sunday evening with the announcement of its new “Deep Research” modality, an AI agent available to ChatGPT Pro subscription plan ($200/month) users that’s designed to save humans hours by researching, well, “deeply” and expansively across the web for given topics and compiling professional quality reports across specialized domains from business to science, medicine, marketing and more.

Users of ChatGPT Pro (and soon, ChatGPT Plus, Team, Enterprise and Edu) in the U.S. will be able to access Deep Research by clicking on the option underneath the prompt entry/compose bar at the bottom of the ChatGPT website and apps.

Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, described the feature in a series of posts on his personal account on the social network X as “like a superpower ...