As China’s DeepSeek chatbot intensifies competition in the AI space, US tech giant OpenAI unveiled a chatbot tool called ‘Deep Research’ ahead of high-level meetings in Tokyo on Monday.
Artificial intelligence (AI) newcomer DeepSeek has taken Silicon Valley by storm, with some calling its high performance and supposedly low cost a wake-up call for American developers. OpenAI’s new tool ‘does in ten minutes what would take a human several hours.’ Its ChatGPT helped propel the rise of generative AI into public consciousness in 2022.
“You give it a prompt and ChatGPT will search, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to produce a comprehensive research analyst-level report,” the company said in a statement. In a live-streamed video, OpenAI researchers showed how the tool can crunch web search data to help recommend ski equipment for a snowy vacation in Japan.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman said the intensive research, which ‘pro’ ChatGPT users can access up to 100 times a month, was ‘computationally intensive and slow’. “But this is the first AI system that can perform such a wide range of complex, valuable tasks,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Altman is in Tokyo, where he will meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba and Masayoshi Son, head of Japanese tech investment giant SoftBank Group, on Monday.
New type of hardware
Altman and Son will also host a forum with about 500 businesses in Tokyo on Monday, where they are expected to announce plans to boost Japan’s AI infrastructure. According to the Nikkei Business Daily, this will include building AI data centers and power plants to operate them, without specifying the amount of investment.
SoftBank and OpenAI are part of the Stargate campaign announced by US President Donald Trump to invest $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States. Japanese Prime Minister Ishiba is expected to travel to Washington later this week to meet with Trump for the leaders’ first in-person meeting.
Separately, Altman told Nikkei that he wants to develop a “new type of hardware” using artificial intelligence in partnership with Apple’s former chief design officer Jony Ive. But according to Nikkei, Altman indicated that it would be a few years before a prototype was released.
Altman told the newspaper that DeepSick is “a good model” that highlights the serious competition in AI reasoning technology, but its “level of capability is not new.” DeepSeek’s performance has led to a wave of accusations that it has reverse-engineered the capabilities of leading American technologies, such as AI-powered ChatGPT.
Last week, OpenAI warned that Chinese companies were actively trying to copy its advanced AI models, prompting closer cooperation with US authorities. Some X users compared DeepSeek’s so-called ‘thinking mode’ and the time it takes Deep Research to compile its reports, as well as similar names.
Although OpenAI did not release details of Altman’s next activities, media reports said he was expected to travel to Seoul on Tuesday, where he will meet with the head of the IT group, Kakao.
