Spooked by DeepSeek, OpenAI launches new ChatGPT tool

Generative artificial intelligence heavyweight OpenAI launched a new AI tool on Sunday called "deep research", which it said conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks.

The announcement comes as China's AI newcomer DeepSeek's chatbot sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with its high performance and supposed low cost prompting calls for US developers to go faster.

OpenAI, whose ChatGPT fronted generative AI's emergence into public consciousness in 2022, said its new tool "accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours".

Deep research is powered by a version of the upcoming OpenAI o3 model optimized for web browsing and data analysis. 

Users have to give a prompt and OpenAI's chatbot ChatGPT will find, analyse, and synthesise several online sources such as text, images, and PDFs to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst, OpenAI said.

"It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours," OpenAI said.

OpenAI added that deep research is still in its early stages and has limitations. 

"It may struggle with distinguishing authoritative information from rumors, and currently shows weakness in confidence calibration, often failing to convey uncertainty accurately," it said.

Deep research is available from Sunday on the web version of ChatGPT, and will be rolled out to mobile and desktop apps within February, OpenAI said.

Deep research is the second AI agent launched by OpenAI this year after it previewed a tool in January called Operator, which can perform a variety of tasks such as creating to-do lists or assisting with vacation planning.