AI assisted search-based research works now

Summary

AI assisted search-based research actually works now 21st April 2025 For the past two and a half years the feature I’ve most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the first glimpses of this back in early 2023, with Perplexity (first launched December 2022, first prompt leak in January 2023) and then the GPT-4 powered Microsoft Bing (which launched/cratered spectacularly in February 2023). Since then a whole bunch of people have taken a swing at this problem, most notably Google Gemini and ChatGPT Search. Those 2023-era versions were promising but very disappointing. They had a strong tendency to hallucinate details that weren’t present in the search results, to the point that you couldn’t trust anything they told you. In this first half of 2025 I think these systems have finally crossed the line into being genuinely useful. Deep Research, from three different vendors First came the Deep Research implementations—Google Gemini and then OpenAI and then Perplexity launched products with that name and they were all impressive: they could take a query, then churn away for several minutes assembling a lengthy report with dozens (sometimes hundreds) of citations. Gemini’s version had a huge upgrade a few weeks ago when they switched it to using Gemini 2.5 Pro, and I’ve had some outstanding results from it since then. Waiting a few minutes for a 10+ page report isn’t my ideal workflow for this kind of tool. I’m impatient, I want answers faster than that! o3 and o4-mini are really good at search Last week, OpenAI released search-enabled o3 and o4-mini through ChatGPT. On the surface these look like the same idea as we’ve seen already: LLMs that have the option to call a search tool as part of replying to a prompt. But there’s one very significant difference: these models can run searches as part of the chain-of-thought reasoning process they use before producing their final answer. This turns out to be a huge deal. I’ve be...