OpenAI: ‘Deep Research available to free ChatGPT users very soon’

Deep Research is currently available for ChatGPT Plus, Pro, Teams, Enterprise, and EDU users. ChatGPT users without a subscription plan can enjoy the features of OpenAI’s AI agent ‘very soon.’

Isa Fulford, a Member of technical staff at OpenAI, and Zhiqing Sun, a research scientists at OpenAI, confirm that OpenAI is testing Deep Research for free customers and will share more details soon.

“So if you haven't tried deep research, it's available now for Plus, Pro, Teams, Enterprise, and EDU users. And we'll launch it for free very soon,” they told attendees of OpenAI’s Forum Webcast last week.

Unfortunately, the OpenAI employees don’t share any details on when ChatGPT users without a subscription plan can expect to try out Deep Research.

Deep Research is an AI-powered agent that does all the work for you. The only thing you’ll have to do is to enter a detailed prompt and tap the Deep Research button. ChatGPT does all the heavy lifting.

Deep Research is powered by OpenAI’s o3 model, which has been optimized for web browsing and data analysis. The AI agent adds reasoning to search and is capable of interpreting and analyzing massive amounts of data, including text, images, and PDFs, on the internet. This is also known as ‘multimodality’.

The entire process takes between five and thirty minutes. Users will receive a notification once the research is complete. Deep Research generates reports in the chat window containing the results of the research, including source references.

Once the report is generated, users can also view a summary of the deep research thought process. This should make it easier to verify the information the feature produces. OpenAI plans to expand Deep Research to include embedded images, data visualization, and other analytic outputs.

OpenAI has stated that Deep Research currently has its limitations. For example, it can sometimes make up details or ‘hallucinate’ facts.

Deep Research was announced in February and is only available to ChatGPT users with a paid subscription. It’s also limited to ten queries per month for Plus subscribers.