ChatGPT Now Offers a ‘Lightweight’ Version of Deep Research to All Users

OpenAI is expanding its Deep Research artificial intelligence (AI) agent to all ChatGPT users. The San Francisco-based AI firm announced that it is now offering a “lightweight” version of the tool to all users on the platform — it was previously limited to paid subscribers. This version of Deep Research will be powered by the o4-mini AI model and will be available with certain rate limits. The expansion of the AI agent comes just weeks after Google made its Deep Research model available to all users.

OpenAI’s Deep Research AI Agent Is Coming to All Users

In a post on X (formerly known as Twitter), the official handle of OpenAI announced the expansion of Deep Research. With this move, free users will get access to the AI agent for the first time, whereas the paid subscribers will get higher rate limits. The AI firm said it has started powering the feature with the o4-mini AI model, making the tool’s usage cost-efficient.

With this, the ChatGPT free users will get five lightweight Deep Research queries per month, as per the company’s website. ChatGPT Pro users, who earlier had 100 queries per month, will now get 250 queries in the same duration. 

Once the regular limit is hit, the queries are automatically switched to the lightweight version. Users on the Plus and Team plans can make 25 Deep Research queries per month. Enterprise and Edu subscribers will get access to this next week, with rate limits similar to the Team plan.

Deep Research in ChatGPT

OpenAI says that the lightweight version of Deep Research is “nearly as intelligent” as the regular version, while being cheaper to process. The responses will be shorter than the regular version, but the company claims that the quality of the response will not be compromised.

Gadgets 360 staff members were able to access the lightweight version of Deep Research. The icon is located underneath the text field, next to the reasoning icon. While using the AI agent, users will have to share a primary query. Based on that, ChatGPT will ask questions to narrow the scope of research and understand the primary requirements. After that, it will conduct research, which can take between five and 30 minutes.

The entire chain-of-thought (CoT) is visible in a sidebar on the right side. The sources used to find the information are cited both next to the relevant sentences and at the bottom.