New term: deep research

2024-12-11 · Publisher : Google · Domain : Artificial Intelligence

Deep research refers to an agent that runs a multi-step web investigation on its own for several minutes, then writes a structured report with sources.

### Definition **Deep research** is an assistant mode in which an agent plans an investigation, queries the web many times, reads numerous pages, refines its searches as results come in, then synthesizes everything into a report with links to its sources. ### Origin Google launched Deep Research in Gemini Advanced on December 11, 2024, the day Gemini 2.0 was announced, running on Gemini 1.5 Pro. Dave Citron, product lead for the Gemini app, described a tool that "creates a multi-step research plan for you to either revise or approve" and browses "the way you do: searching, finding interesting pieces of information and then starting a new search based on what it's learned". ### What the term covers - A report that can be exported to Google Docs, organized and linked to the original sources. - OpenAI reused the name on February 2, 2025 for its own o3-based agent; Perplexity and others followed. - API versions came later, so that deep research could be built into applications. ### Criticism and limits A long, well-formatted report is not necessarily right: the agent can misread a source, overweight another or rely on unreliable pages. Processing time and cost far exceed those of a classic search. ### Key takeaway Deep research established the idea of an agent you hand a background task to, with a verifiable deliverable, rather than a simple question-and-answer exchange.

Tags : Vocabulaire, Agents, Recherche, Web