OpenAI to Expand Access to Deep Research AI Agent Across ChatGPT Tiers

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman shares plans to bring o3 Deep Research agent to free and ChatGPT Plus users

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More Earlier this month, OpenAI debuted a new AI agent powered by its upcoming full o3 reasoning AI model called "Deep Research." As with Google's Gemini-powered Deep Research agent released late last year, the idea behind OpenAI's Deep Research is to provide a largely autonomous assistant that can scour the web and other digital scholarly sources for information about a topic or problem provided by the user, then compile it all into a neat report while the user goes about their other business in other tabs or leaving their computer behind entirely to live their life, providing the final report several minutes or even hours later with a notification. Yet unlike Google's Deep Research, the value of the OpenAi o3 Deep Research was immediately apparent to many outside the AI community, with some such as economist Tyler Cowen, who called it "amazing." While initially unveiled as a product limited to ChatGPT Pro subscribers ($200 per month), OpenAI said at the time it would move down its subscription tiers to the lower-priced ChatGPT Plus ($20 per month) and Team ($30 per month) as well as Edu and Enterprise (variable pricing) plans. Today OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman clarified more of the company's current thinking around making o3 Deep Research more widely available, quote-posting another user on X, @seconds_0, who wrote: "ok, OAI Deep Research is worth probably $1000 a month to me. This is utterly transformative to how my brain engages with the world. Im beyond in love and a little in awe." Altman responded: "i think we are going to initially offer 10 uses per month for chatgpt plus and 2 per month in the free tier, with the intent to scale these up over time. it probably is worth $1000 a month to some users but i'm excited to see what everyone does with it!" While 10 users per month for the ChatGPT Plus tier seems workable, to me 2 uses per month seems almost trivial. I guess if you're a free user, the hope is to hook you with how well it works and encourage you to upgrade to a higher cost plan, pulling you up the funnel -- or whatever salespeople like to say. Still, it is helpful to learn what OpenAI is thinking about when it comes to the availability of its powerful new products and agents. If you're a free ChatGPT user, you best make sure your 2 uses per month of Deep Research are for queries your really want or need answered. And compared to Deep Research, which is free (though powered by last generation's Gemini 1.5 Pro model), OpenAI better hope that its o3 Deep Research is worth the price.

Want to use ChatGPT Deep Research for free? Sam Altman confirms how often you'll be able to use the new AI agent

The release date of Deep Research outside of ChatGPT Pro is still TBD OpenAI's new AI agent, Deep Research, will be coming to ChatGPT Plus and Free users shortly, and now we know just how many times a month you'll be able to use the research analyst. Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, shared the info on X, all-but-confirming that Plus users ($20/month) will get to use Deep Research 10 times per month while free users will be able to use it two times per month. Not only that, Altman also hinted at a future increase in the usage on Plus and free tiers by saying they have the "intent to scale these up over time." ChatGPT Deep Research launched at the start of February and is currently only available to ChatGPT Pro users to the tune of $200/month. The AI agent is an incredible tool that OpenAI says can "accomplish in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours." With the ability to do work for you, by simply asking the AI tool to conduct research and report its findings, Deep Research is an absolute game-changer for productivity and it's incredible that we're going to be getting access to its power for free. Altman's announcement was in response to an X user who said, "ok, OpenAI Deep Research is worth probably $1000 a month to me. This is utterly transformative to how my brain engages with the world. I'm beyond in love and a little in awe." To which Altman responded, "It probably is worth $1000 a month to some users but I'm excited to see what everyone does with it!" We're yet to try Deep Research ourselves, but considering the examples shown on OpenAI's website, this new AI agent could completely revolutionize the way we interact with AI. OpenAI's website says, "Deep research is OpenAI's next agent that can do work for you independently - you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst." That may sound like a professional tool, just for professional use, but some of the examples which you can read about in my article, 3 reasons why I can't wait to use OpenAI Deep Research, showcase just how useful this tool could be for everyone, not just those using it for work. While Altman has confirmed Deep Research will come to Plus and free tiers, we still don't have a timeframe on when that will be. Here's hoping it's sooner rather than later.

OpenAI Says It Will Make Its $200 Deep Research Model Available for Free

Deep Research has been praised for its ability to produce detailed research reports. OpenAI will make its Deep Research model available to users on ChatGPT's free tier soon, according to an X post by CEO Sam Altman. Deep Research is the colloquial name for large language models that use a "test-time" computing method to produce in-depth, detailed research reports. These reports can take anywhere from 30 minutes up to multiple hours to produce, and technologists have said Deep Research could replace humans in jobs like business analysis or finance. Of course, it is important to take these claims with a grain of salt. Altman also said that OpenAI will consolidate its numerous different AI models. Many people have complained that everyday users do not understand the difference between its varying models and what they offer. "We hate the model picker as much as you do and want to return to magic unified intelligence," Altman said. "We will next ship GPT-4.5, the model we called Orion internally, as our last non-chain-of-thought model. After that, a top goal for us is to unify o-series models and GPT-series models by creating systems that can use all our tools, know when to think for a long time or not, and generally be useful for a very wide range of tasks." At some point in the near future, users on the free tier will gain "unlimited" access to a new model that includes o3 built-in, though Altman says that paid users will get a higher level of intelligence, whatever that means. Currently, Deep Research is only available to ChatGPT users who pay for its premium, $200-a-month tier. It has always been expected that OpenAI would make its bleeding edge models available to more users as it scales up its server infrastructure, and Altman has confirmed as much in another recent X post. In his typical fashion of writing everything in lowercase like a Gen Z girl, Altman wrote, “i think we are going to initially offer 10 uses per month for ChatGPT plus and 2 per month in the free tier, with the intent to scale these up over time." Large language models like ChatGPT are, in essence, probability machines, or a really powerful autocomplete. They ingest billions of pieces of human-written text and are capable of generating new texts with the verisimilitude of something written by a person. They do not actually "think" like a human does, however, and companies like OpenAI have had to find new techniques to improve their accuracy and capabilities. Test-time thinking forces the language model to fact-check itself before answering a question. For instance, if a user asks the model how much it would cost to replace every Uber in the United States with Waymos, the model would break the query down into multiple related questionsâ€"how many Ubers are on the road today, how much each Waymo vehicle costs, and so on and so forth. The AI industry has been throwing spaghetti at the wall for some time now, trying to find the unlock that will make language models truly capable of replacing humans in a variety of tasks. Deep Research is the latest such attempt; another is AI "agents" that can take control of a user's computer to actually complete tasks, like booking a flight. Agents could be particularly useful for demographics like the elderly, who may not be tech-savvy and could ask AI to help them navigate a computer. Early users of agents like OpenAI's Operator say they are very slow and error-prone, however. As impressive as Deep Research might be at producing lengthy research reports, the accuracy of AI language models remains a problem. During the Super Bowl, Google aired a commercial promoting its Gemini chatbot that included inaccurate information. X users have noticed if you ask ChatGPT what players are on various NFL teams, the chatbot will return incorrect information even though ChatGPT has access to rosters from NFL.com. And of course, Apple was forced to neuter its AI-based notification summaries after producing incorrect summaries of BBC news notifications. Some proponents of AI have argued that sounding correct often means the text is correct, but a major problem with AI models seems to be that its users assume whatever they produce is correct even when it is not. Google repeatedly presenting incorrect information during demos of its AI is emblematic of this problem. It seems like leaders at the tech giants just glaze over and skim whatever their AI models produce without doing any work to fact-check it. Meanwhile, OpenAI is dealing with other problems, namely a long-running legal battle with Elon Musk, which escalated this week after the early backer of OpenAI made a hostile $97 billion offer to acquire the AI company out from under Altman. Though Musk was able to take control of Twitter despite all odds, this situation is considerably different, as OpenAI is private and remains a non-profit. Although OpenAI is trying to convert into a for-profit company, for now it does not have any fiduciary duty to investors and likely does not have to consider acquisition offers.