OpenAI expands 'Deep Reseach' to those paying $20 a month or more, a day after Microsoft made OpenAI's 'Think Deeper' free for all Copilot users with no usage caps

At the beginning of February, OpenAI launched Deep Research, a tool designed to conduct multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks. The AI firm claimed that what the agent accomplishes in ten minutes would take several hours for a human equivalent.

Previously, the agent was shipped exclusively for ChatGPT Pro users, buried under OpenAI's $200 monthly subscription plan. However, the tool's availability is now expanding to ChatGPT Plus, Edu, Enterprise, and Teams users.

It's worth noting that ChatGPT Plus users will be limited to 10 Deep Research queries per month, while Pro users' monthly limit has been bumped to 120 from 100 queries per month.

Aside from shipping Deep research to more users, OpenAI is shipping several improvements to ChatGPT, including embedding images to citations for a rich user experience.

ChatGPT is also getting better file support, making it easier for the AI-powered chatbot to analyze documents.

ChatGPT Pro, Plus, Edu, Teams, and Enterprise users can now leverage Deep Research capabilities by clicking on the dedicated button on the tool's interface.

Please be aware that the chatbot may take a bit longer to respond, depending on the complexity of your query. It could take anywhere between 5 and 30 minutes.

This is because the tool identifies, analyzes, and synthesizes large masses of data across the internet to create a comprehensive response based on the user's query.

Interestingly, OpenAI claims the agentic AI tool potentially matches the performance index of a human research analyst.

To that end, it remains unclear when OpenAI plans to ship the AI agent tool to free users, as it demands an exorbitant amount of computing power.

Indeed, OpenAI's announcement came a day after Microsoft announced that it would offer OpenAI's paywalled Voice and Think Deeper features to all Copilot users for free without usage caps.

It'll be interesting to see if Microsoft manages to dent OpenAI's broad ChatGPT user base by offering some of its paywalled features for free to all Copilot users.