Hasta La Gadget!

There’s no two ways about it, there’s a newfound sense of urgency at OpenAI. Two days after releasing o3-mini to the world, the company made a surprise announcement on Sunday evening, revealing Deep Research. The new feature allows ChatGPT to find, analyze and synthesize hundreds of websites and online sources to create reports “at the level of a research analyst.”

On top of the usual text questions, users can upload files, including PDFs and spreadsheets, when prompting ChatGPT in this way. The chatbot will then take “anywhere from 5 to 30 minutes” to compile an answer, a side panel documenting the agent’s progress and citations as it works. “It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours,” OpenAI says of the new feature.

“Our ultimate aspiration is a model that can uncover and discover new knowledge for itself,” said Mark Chen, chief research officer at OpenAI, during the company’s reveal livestream. “It’s core to our [artificial general intelligence] roadmap.”

As far as limitations go, OpenAI says ChatGPT can sometimes hallucinate facts or make incorrect inferences when conducting Deep Research, though “at a notably lower” rate than other current models. Additionally, the agent may sometimes struggle to differentiate between authoritative information and rumors. Users may also notice some formatting errors. “We expect all these issues to quickly improve with more usage and time,” the company notes.

If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because Google’s Advanced suite includes its own Deep Research feature, which not only shares the same name but broadly offers the same set of capabilities as well. One significant difference between the two is that Google offers access to Gemini Advanced through its $20 per month One AI Premium plan. By contrast, you’ll need a $200 per month ChatGPT Pro plan to start using OpenAI’s version of Deep Research today.

“Deep research in ChatGPT is currently very compute intensive,” the company reasons, adding it will limit Pro users to 100 queries per month. “The longer it takes to research a query, the more inference compute is required.”

OpenAI says it’s working on a version of Deep Research powered by a smaller, more cost-effective model. In turn, that will allow the company to offer “significantly higher rate limits.” In the meantime, OpenAI hopes to get the tool in the hands of Plus users “in about a month,” following a round of safety testing. As with most of the company’s other recent releases, European users will need to wait before they can try out the tool for themselves, with Deep Research not yet available to people in the UK, Switzerland and the broader European economic zone.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/chatgpts-deep-research-tool-can-create-reports-from-hundreds-of-online-sources-022223298.html?src=rss

OpenAI announced on X that it’s hosting a livestream from Tokyo tonight, offering no more context beyond, “Deep Research.” (Didn’t Google already take that name for Gemini?) The stream is scheduled for 7PM ET (4PM PT/ 9AM JST). You can watch it on YouTube below.

Just a few days ago, OpenAI released its new reasoning model, o3-mini. The company says it produces “more accurate and clearer answers, with stronger reasoning abilities” than its predecessor, and “works with search to find up-to-date answers with links to relevant web sources.” CEO Sam Altman and other members of the OpenAI team held an AMA on Reddit on Friday to talk about it. And a week before that, OpenAI introduced its new Operator tool, a “Computer-Using Agent” that it said “can go to the web to perform tasks for you.” 

At the same time, we’ve seen the sudden rise of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI assistant app that was released at the end of January and spiked in popularity on app stores last week. Following all the initial hype, a report from the Wall Street Journal said OpenAI is investigating whether its models were used to train DeepSeek.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-announces-surprise-deep-research-stream-tonight-220708906.html?src=rss

OpenAI announced on X that it’s hosting a livestream from Tokyo tonight, offering no more context beyond, “Deep Research.” (Didn’t Google already take that name for Gemini?) There’s no link yet, just a note to stay tuned. The stream is scheduled for 7PM ET (4PM PT/ 9AM JST).

Just a few days ago, OpenAI released its new reasoning model, o3-mini. The company says it produces “more accurate and clearer answers, with stronger reasoning abilities” than its predecessor, and “works with search to find up-to-date answers with links to relevant web sources.” CEO Sam Altman and other members of the OpenAI team just held an AMA on Reddit on Friday to discuss the new model. And a week before that, OpenAI introduced its new Operator tool, a “Computer-Using Agent” that it said “can go to the web to perform tasks for you.” 

At the same time, we’ve seen the sudden rise of DeepSeek, the Chinese AI assistant app that was released at the end of January and spiked in popularity on app stores last week. Following all the initial hype, a report from the Wall Street Journal said OpenAI is investigating whether its models were used to train DeepSeek.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-announces-surprise-deep-research-stream-tonight-220708906.html?src=rss

On Saturday evening, Trump signed executive orders to impose tariffs on Mexico, Canada and China under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), with a White House fact sheet claiming the move is meant to hold the US’ largest trading partners “accountable to their promises of halting illegal immigration and stopping poisonous fentanyl and other drugs from flowing into our country.” The orders put 25 percent additional tariffs on imports from Canada and Mexico, the one exception being that energy products from Canada will be subject to a 10 percent tariff. Imports from China will also face a 10 percent tariff.

The broad tariffs are expected to take effect on Tuesday and could have ramifications not only for American businesses, but for consumers too. Mexico, Canada and China are the top suppliers of US goods imports, each accounting for hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of products coming into the country each year, data from the US Department of Commerce and the US International Trade Commission show. Those products span a wide range of categories, from agriculture to transportation/automotive, fuel, electronics, wood, furniture, alcohol and more.

Mexico and Canada dominate US imports of agricultural goods, with Mexico supplying items like fruits, vegetables and nuts, and the bulk of imported animal products like beef coming from Canada, according to Trading Economics and the US Department of Agriculture. The two countries have also been our top suppliers for transportation equipment, including cars and car parts, and crude oil. Canada is responsible for almost 60 percent of US crude oil imports according to the Congressional Research Service, which noted in a report last month that the new tariffs “might affect the U.S. crude oil market and consumer fuel prices.”

Imports of electronics have largely come from China, and Mexico follows closely behind. Trading Economics data also show machinery, toys and games, furniture and plastics among the top goods imported from China in recent years. The electronics sector could take an additional hit down the line, as Trump has said he also plans to impose tariffs on imported semiconductors, along with pharmaceuticals and steel.

Leaders from Canada and Mexico have both responded to the tariffs, saying they would impose their own on US goods in retaliation. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau on Saturday announced a 25 percent tariff on roughly $107 billion (155 billion Canadian dollars) worth of US goods, Reuters reports.

In a statement released after the announcement of the tariffs, John Murphy, U.S. Chamber of Commerce Senior Vice President and Head of International, warned that Trump’s new tariffs could negatively affect both consumers and the supply chains. “The President is right to focus on major problems like our broken border and the scourge of fentanyl, but the imposition of tariffs under IEEPA is unprecedented, won’t solve these problems, and will only raise prices for American families and upend supply chains,” Murphy said. “The Chamber will consult with our members, including main street businesses across the country impacted by this move, to determine next steps to prevent economic harm to Americans.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/trumps-tariffs-on-mexico-canada-and-china-could-drive-up-prices-of-cars-electronics-fuel-food-and-more-172823156.html?src=rss

OpenAI’s latest machine learning mode has arrived. On Friday, the company released o3-mini and it’s available to try now. What’s more, for the first time OpenAI is making one of its “reasoning” models available to free users of ChatGPT. If you want to try it yourself, select the “Reason” button under the message composer to get started. 

According to OpenAI, o3-mini is faster and more accurate than its predecessor, o1-mini. In A/B testing, the company found o3-mini was 24 percent faster than o1 at delivering a response. Moreover, set to its “medium” reasoning effort, the new model can come close to the performance of the more expensive o1 system in some math, coding and science benchmarks. Like OpenAI’s other reasoning models, o3-mini will show you how it arrived at an answer instead of simply responding to a prompt. Notably, the model works with ChatGPT Search out of box, enabling it to comb the web for the latest information and useful links. OpenAI says it’s working on integrating search across all of its reasoning models.   

“The release of OpenAI o3-mini marks another step in OpenAI’s mission to push the boundaries of cost-effective intelligence. By optimizing reasoning for STEM domains while keeping costs low, we’re making high-quality AI even more accessible,” OpenAI said. “This model continues our track record of driving down the cost of intelligence — reducing per-token pricing by 95% since launching GPT-4 — while maintaining top-tier reasoning capabilities. As AI adoption expands, we remain committed to leading at the frontier, building models that balance intelligence, efficiency, and safety at scale.”

With today’s announcement, o3-mini will replace o1-mini in the model picker. Additionally, OpenAI is tripling the rate limit for Plus and Team ChatGPT users from 50 messages per day with o1-mini to 150 messages per day for o3-mini. OpenAI’s recently launched $200 per month Pro tier offers unlimited access to the new system. 

When OpenAI first previewed o3 and o3-mini at the end of last year, CEO Sam Altman said the latter would arrive “around the end of January.” Altman gave a more concrete timeline on January 17 when he wrote on X that OpenAI was “planning to ship in a couple of weeks.”

Now that it’s here, it’s safe to say o3-mini arrives with a sense of urgency. On January 20, the same day Altman was attending Donald Trump’s inauguration, China’s DeepSeek quietly released its R1 chain-of-thought model. By January 27, the company’s chatbot surpassed ChatGPT as the most-download free app on the US App Store after going viral. The overnight success of DeepSeek wiped $1 trillion of stock market value, and almost certainly left OpenAI blindsided. 

In the aftermath of last week, OpenAI said it was working with Microsoft to identify two accounts the company claims may have distilled its models. Distillation is the process of transferring the knowledge of an advanced AI system to a smaller, more efficient one. Distillation is not a controversial practice. DeepSeek has used distillation on its own R1 model to train its smaller algorithms; in fact, OpenAI’s terms of service allow for distillation as long users don’t train competing models on the outputs of the company’s AI.

OpenAI did not explicitly name DeepSeek. “We know [China]-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies,” an OpenAI spokesperson told The Guardian recently. However, David Sacks, President Trump’s AI advisor, was more direct, claiming there was “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek had “distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models.”

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/ai/openais-o3-mini-is-here-and-available-to-all-users-190918706.html?src=rss