OpenAI Holds Surprise Livestream to Announce Multi-Step 'Deep Research' Capability

Just three hours ago, OpenAI made a surprise announcement to their 3.9 million followers on X.com. 'Live from Tokyo,' they'd be livestreaming... something. Their description of the event was just two words.

'Deep Research'

UPDATE: The stream has begun, and it's about OpenAI's next 'agent-ic offering'. ('OpenAI cares about agents because we believe they're going to transform knowlege work...')
'We're introducing a capability called Deep Research... a model that does multi-step research. It discovers content, it synthesizes content, and it reasons about this content.' It even asks 'clarifying' questions to your prompt to make sure its multi-step research stays on track. Deep Research will be launching in ChatGPT Pro later today, rolling out into other OpenAI products...

And OpenAI's site now has an 'Introducing Deep Research' page. Its official description? 'An agent that uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks for you. Available to Pro users today, Plus and Team next.'



Before the livestream began, X.com users shared their reactions to the coming announcement:
'It's like DeepSeek, but cleaner'
'Deep do do if things don't work out'
'Live from Tokyo? Hope this research includes the secret to waking up early!'
'Stop trying, we don't trust u'

But one X.com user had presciently pointed out OpenAI has used the phrase 'deep research' before. In July of 2024, Reuters reported on internal documentation (confirmed with 'a person familiar with the matter') code-named 'Strawberry' which suggested OpenAI was working on 'human-like reasoning skills.'

How Strawberry works is a tightly kept secret even within OpenAI, the person said. The document describes a project that uses Strawberry models with the aim of enabling the company's AI to not just generate answers to queries but to plan ahead enough to navigate the internet autonomously and reliably to perform what OpenAI terms 'deep research,' according to the source. This is something that has eluded AI models to date, according to interviews with more than a dozen AI researchers.

Asked about Strawberry and the details reported in this story, an OpenAI company spokesperson said in a statement: 'We want our AI models to see and understand the world more like we do. Continuous research into new AI capabilities is a common practice in the industry, with a shared belief that these systems will improve in reasoning over time.' The spokesperson did not directly address questions about Strawberry.

The Strawberry project was formerly known as Q*, which Reuters reported last year was already seen inside the company as a breakthrough... OpenAI hopes the innovation will improve its AI models' reasoning capabilities dramatically, the person familiar with it said, adding that Strawberry involves a specialized way of processing an AI model after it has been pre-trained on very large datasets.

Researchers Reuters interviewed say that reasoning is key to AI achieving human or super-human-level intelligence... OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said earlier this year that in AI 'the most important areas of progress will be around reasoning ability.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.