The China Mail - OpenAI announces new 'deep research' tool for ChatGPT

Artificial intelligence newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with its high performance and supposed low cost prompting calls for US developers to go faster.

OpenAI, whose ChatGPT fronted generative AI's emergence into public consciousness in 2022, said its new tool "accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours".

"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," it said in a statement.

In a livestreamed video announcement, OpenAI researchers showed how the tool can synthesise web search data to help recommend ski equipment to buy for a snow holiday in Japan.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman is in Tokyo to meet Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba later Monday along with Masayoshi Son, head of Japanese tech investment behemoth SoftBank Group.

SoftBank and OpenAI are part of the Stargate drive announced by US President Donald Trump to invest up to $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.

Ishiba is expected to visit Washington to meet Trump for the leaders' first in-person meeting later this week.

- 'New kind of hardware' -

On Monday afternoon, Altman and Son will hold a forum in Tokyo with around 500 businesses at which they are expected to announce plans to boost Japan's AI infrastructure.

The Nikkei business daily reported that this will include building AI data centres and power plants to run them, without specifying the scale of the investment required.

Separately, Altman told the Nikkei he wants to develop "a new kind of hardware" using artificial intelligence in partnership with Apple's former chief design officer Jony Ive.

But Altman indicated that it would take several years to unveil a prototype, the Nikkei said.

Altman also told the newspaper that DeepSeek is "a good model" that highlights the serious competition for AI reasoning technology, but that its "capability level isn't new".

DeepSeek's performance has sparked a wave of accusations that it has reverse-engineered the capabilities of leading US technology, such as the AI powering ChatGPT.

Last week OpenAI warned that Chinese companies are actively attempting to replicate its advanced AI models, prompting closer cooperation with US authorities.

W.Tam--ThChM