American giant Open AI unveils new tool: Deep Research “which can work for you independently”

As Chinese companies try to catch up with American giants in terms of artificial intelligence, the world leader OpenAI announced the release of a new tool this Monday, February 3.

The world leader in artificial intelligence (AI) OpenAI, facing competition from the Chinese DeepSeek, has unveiled a new tool for “deep search” for ChatGPT, Monday, February 3 in Tokyo on the sidelines of an event organized with its Japanese partner Softbank.

The announcement of this new tool comes at a time when the emergence of the Chinese start-up, which offers a powerful conversational robot, developed at low cost and operating with fewer resources, calls into question the economic model of the sector.

The American OpenAI, whose conversational tool marked the emergence of generative AI among the general public in 2022, indicated that the new functionality “accomplishes in a few dozen minutes what would take a human many hours”.

A new tool deployed

“Deep research is OpenAI's new tool that can work for you independently: you give it a command, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive, human-level analyst report,” OpenAI claims on its website.

Sam Altman, OpenAI's chief executive, enthused on stage at a business forum in Tokyo. “This is a system that I think can do, this is just my guess, but I think it can do a single-digit percentage of all the economically valuable tasks in the world,” he said.

Later Monday, Altman is also scheduled to meet with Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba, along with Masayoshi Son, CEO of SoftBank Group, the Japanese tech investment giant. Altman and Son are partners in “Stargate,” a new project that includes investments of at least $500 billion in artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure in the United States, recently unveiled by U.S. President Donald Trump.

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China’s progress toward catching up with the United States

In an interview with Nikkei, Altman said China is catching up “significantly”, to U.S.-based AI technologies. He also told the Japanese daily that DeepSeek was “a good model” that highlighted the serious competition for AI reasoning technology, but that its “level of capability was not new.”

Last week, OpenAI warned that Chinese companies were actively trying to replicate its advanced AI models. “If authoritarian governments misuse powerful AI to consolidate their power, that would be a bad thing,”, OpenAI's CEO warned in the Nikkei. Still, “we have no plans to continue DeepSeek at this point. We're just going to continue to build great products and lead the world in modeling capabilities. It will work well,” Sam Altman told the media on Monday.

Japanese Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba is expected to travel to Washington later this week to meet Mr. Trump in the first in-person meeting of the two leaders. AI, the economy, China, North Korea and national security are expected to be at the center of their discussions.

A joint venture between Americans and Japanese

In addition, SoftBank and OpenAI took advantage of this forum bringing together some 500 Japanese companies to announce the birth of a joint venture with the aim of offering advanced AI to Japanese companies.

“A memorandum of understanding has just been officially signed between SoftBank and Open AI with a view to creating a 50-50 joint venture,” said the CEO of the Japanese group, Masayoshi Son, while presenting a new AI product called “Crystal.”

Masayoshi Son, holding a purple crystal ball, said “Crystal” would use AI to provide personalized support service to businesses by analyzing system data, reports, emails and meetings in real time.

In a joint statement from the two companies, Japanese tech investor SoftBank announced that it “will spend $3 billion annually to deploy OpenAI's solutions across its group companies.” The joint venture “will serve as a springboard for introducing AI agents tailored to the unique needs of Japanese businesses while establishing a model for global adoption,”, according to the press release.