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Deep Research

3 min readUpdated August 2026
Deep Research
Type
AI agent capability
Developer
OpenAI, Google, and others
Introduced
February 2025 (OpenAI)
Purpose
Autonomous web research with cited reports
Related
Agentic AI, RAG, NotebookLM

Deep Research is an AI agent capability that autonomously conducts multi-step research on the internet and produces cited reports, introduced by OpenAI in ChatGPT on 3 February 2025.[1][2] Instead of answering a query in a single step, the agent plans a research process, browses and analyses sources including text, images and PDFs, and synthesises the results into a structured report over a period of roughly five to thirty minutes.[1][2]

History

OpenAI launched deep research in ChatGPT in February 2025, describing it as a new agentic capability that "accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours."[1] The original version was powered by a specialised version of the OpenAI o3 reasoning model optimised for web browsing and data analysis.[1][2] By February 2026, the capability was reported to run on a model based on GPT-5.2.[2]

Google subsequently offered an equivalent Deep Research feature in Gemini, positioning it as a personal research assistant that breaks complex research questions into parts, searches the web and, optionally, the user's Workspace content, and produces comprehensive summaries.[3] The feature became part of Gemini for Education, Google's offering for universities, which was rolled out across all public universities in Malaysia.[4]

Key Concepts

Deep Research is an example of an agentic AI workflow: the model does not merely generate text, but plans a sequence of tool use, executes searches, reads pages, and iterates as it gathers evidence.[1][3] The underlying technology combines a reasoning model with retrieval and long-context processing, so that the agent can keep track of hundreds of pages of source material within a single research session.[3]

Key characteristics of the capability include:

  • Multi-step autonomy: the agent breaks a question into sub-questions and searches iteratively, rather than issuing a single query.[1][3]
  • Cited synthesis: the final report includes footnote-style citations, allowing readers to verify claims against the original sources.[1][2]
  • Multimodal input: the agent can interpret text, images and PDFs provided by the user or found online.[1][2]
  • Long-form output: reports can extend to roughly ten thousand words, substantially longer than typical single-response outputs.[1]

Applications and Impact

Deep Research is used for tasks such as market analysis, academic literature reviews, policy research, and due diligence, in which the value lies in the agent gathering and cross-referencing many sources rather than in generating prose.[1][2] The introduction of the capability marked a shift from conversational chatbots toward autonomous agents that complete research work on the user's behalf, and it has been compared with other agentic tools such as NotebookLM and Gemini's research workflows.[4]

>See Also

References

🇲🇾Malaysian Context

In Malaysia, Deep Research became accessible to a large segment of the population through the education sector: Google's Gemini for Education, which includes Deep Research, was rolled out across all 20 public universities, giving nearly 600,000 students and 75,000 faculty members access to the tool for learning and research.[4] The Ministry of Higher Education has provided additional training in AI use, and universities such as Universiti Sains Islam Malaysia (USIM) have used the capability together with NotebookLM for media analysis and coursework.[4] The adoption supports the goals of the National AI Office (NAIO) and the national AI roadmap, which emphasise AI literacy and the integration of AI tools into higher education as part of Malaysia's ambition to build national AI capability by 2030.[4][5]

References

  1. ↑[Introducing deep research — OpenAI](https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/)
  2. ↑[ChatGPT Deep Research — Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ChatGPT_Deep_Research)
  3. ↑[Gemini Deep Research — Google](https://gemini.google/overview/deep-research)
  4. ↑[Gemini expands to all public universities in Malaysia — Google Blog](https://blog.google/company-news/inside-google/around-the-globe/google-asia/gemini-malaysia-universities)
  5. ↑[National AI Office (NAIO) — official website](https://ai.gov.my/)
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