Episode Details

While “LLM-powered Search” is as old as Perplexity and SearchGPT, and open source projects like GPTResearcher and clones like OpenDeepResearch exist, the difference with “Deep Research” products is they are both “agentic” (loosely meaning that an LLM decides the next step in a workflow, usually involving tools) and bundling custom-tuned frontier models (custom tuned o3 and Gemini 1.5 Flash).

The reception to OpenAI’s Deep Research agent has been nothing short of breathless:

"Deep Research is the best public-facing AI product Google has ever released. It's like having a college-educated researcher in your pocket." - Jason Calacanis

“I have had [Deep Research] write a number of ten-page papers for me, each of them outstanding. I think of the quality as comparable to having a good PhD-level research assistant, and sending that person away with a task for a week or two, or maybe more. Except Deep Research does the work in five or six minutes.” - Tyler Cowen

“Deep Research is one of the best bargains in technology.” - Ben Thompson

“my very approximate vibe is that it can do a single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks in the world, which is a wild milestone.” - sama

“Using Deep Research over the past few weeks has been my own personal AGI moment. It takes 10 mins to generate accurate and thorough competitive and market research (with sources) that previously used to take me at least 3 hours.” - OAI employee

“It's like a bazooka for the curious mind” - Dan Shipper

“Deep research can be seen as a new interface for the internet, in addition to being an incredible agent… This paradigm will be so powerful that in the future, navigating the internet manually via a browser will be "old-school", like performing arithmetic calculations by hand.” - Jason Wei

“One notable characteristic of Deep Research is its extreme patience. I think this is rapidly approaching “superhuman patience”. One realization working on this project was that intelligence and patience go really well together.” - HyungWon

“I asked it to write a reference Interaction Calculus evaluator in Haskell. A few exchanges later, it gave me a complete file, including a parser, an evaluator, O(1) interactions and everything. The file compiled, and worked on my test inputs. There are some minor issues, but it is mostly correct. So, in about 30 minutes, o3 performed a job that would take me a day or so.” - Victor Taelin

“Can confirm OpenAI Deep Research is quite strong. In a few minutes it did what used to take a dozen hours. The implications to knowledge work is going to be quite profound when you just ask an AI Agen