Does OpenAI API support the Deep Research model?
Deep Research API Timeline
Plans for Deep Research tools and the API
Openai Deep Research API
Videos
Has anyone been able to put the deep research via api to any good use. I am finding it extremely hard to steer this model, plus it keeps defaulting to it’s knowledge cutoff timeline to make all research plans, even if I have provided with all tools and information.
Another issue is that it keeps defaulting to web search when the mcp tools I have provided would provide much better data for certain tasks.
No amount of prompting helps. Anyone figured out how to make it follow a plan?
So as we all know OpenAI's Deep Research is being talked about everywhere. The same goes with the company that I work for, everyone wanted to try it. They finally tried it the other day, and got a report of around 26 pages about a very specific subject and the quality was ok. But when I saw the structure it hit me: it was clearly a bunch of separate search queries stiched together and rewritten by their model. So why couldn't we just make it ourselves? So I built the agentic workflow that you see in the image in AI Workflow Automation plugin in WordPress which has integration with Perplexity api.
Basically this is how it works: a research query comes in, it gets sent to several different research nodes, each running Sonar Pro, and each one research the topic from a different angle, then each research node passes on the results to an AI node, for which I used Grok 2 because of the large output context window and good writing skills, and then all of them come together to create a unified research report.
I could generate a well cited and factual report of around 5000 to 6000 words in around 7 minutes, which in terms of quality was really on par with the OpenAI one. And the best thing about it: it cost less than 30 cents to run the whole thing!! You can see it in the second image.
And no, I didn't benchmark it against some standard benchmark, it was my own qualitative review of the result.
So yes, you can make your own agents, and I love Perplexity's Sonar Pro and Sonar Reasoning for this use case, especially that now you can limit the time window of the search and limit the search context. It's amazing.
You should be able to get similar results with a workflow built in a tool like N8N if you don't use AI Workflow Automation.
If you do use the plugin and you want the workflow, send me a dm and I'd be happy to share it with you!