Access Granted: Chatgpt’s Top Tool is Now Free but With a Hidden Twist
The hidden twist? You only get five uses of Deep Research per month Deep Research, the research agent inside ChatGPT, is finally coming to free tier users. However, there are some minor differences. The new version of the popular research tool is not exactly the same as the one currently enjoyed by Pro, Plus, Teams and Enterprise users. The new Deep Research, which is rolling out to all free-tier users starting from today, is described by OpenAI as ‘lightweight’. It’s powered by a version of ChatGPT o4-mini in contrast to the existing Deep Research, which is powered by a version of ChatGPT-o3. OpenAI describes the new lightweight Deep Research as “nearly as intelligent as the Deep Research people already know and love, while being significantly cheaper to serve.” In a tweet on the subject OpenAI shared a graph showing accuracy rates for the new lightweight Deep Research compared to the original Deep Research and the o3 model. The bad news is that free-tier users are going to be restricted to five uses per month, so don’t click the Deep Research button (when you get it) unless you really need to use it. A graph showing the accuracy of the new […]