«In early February Openai, the world’s most famous artificial-intelligence firm, released Deep Research, which is “designed to perform in-depth, multi-step research”. With a few strokes of a keyboard, the tool can produce a paper on any topic in minutes. Many academics love it. (...)
Should you shell out $200 a month for Deep Research? (...) To help you decide, your columnist has kicked the tyres of the new model. How good a research assistant is Deep Research, for economists and others?
The obvious conclusions first. Deep Research is unable to conduct primary research, from organising polls in Peru to getting a feel for the body language of a chief executive whose company you might short. Nor can it brew a coffee, making it a poor substitute for a human assistant. Another complaint is that Deep Research’s output is almost always leaden prose, even if you ask it to be more lively. Then again, most people were never good writers anyway, so will hardly care if their ai assistant is a bit dull. (...)
When it comes to data questions requiring more creativity, however, the model struggles. (...) The model has even greater difficulty with more complex questions, including those involving the analysis of source data produced by statistical agencies. For such questions, human assistants retain an edge.