Diving deeper into 'deep research'

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The world’s first one-person unicorn — a company that’s able to reach a $1B valuation with just a single employee — might not be so far off now that AI can take on tasks once reserved for PhD-level researchers. We’ll explore how users are experimenting with OpenAI’s powerful deep research tool to boost their productivity.

Today’s Insights

• Today in AI: OpenAI’s new spinoff and AI agents

• Tutorial: How to analyze Reddit trends with AI

• Frontier: How users are experimenting with ‘deep research’

• 5 new AI tools to boost your productivity

• News, memes, what’s trending on socials, and more

TODAY IN AI

1. OpenAI and SoftBank are starting a new company: We finally know why OpenAI headed across the water to unveil ChatGPT’s new deep research feature in Tokyo. The startup announced it’s going 50-50 with Japanese tech giant SoftBank to form a new company called SB OpenAI Japan. The deal: SoftBank will pay as much as $3B a year to incorporate OpenAI’s latest models into its own enterprise products.

Meanwhile, a trademark filing hints at what’s next for OpenAI:

• It includes references to AI-powered goggles, remotes, smart jewelry, headphones, humanoid robots, and VR headsets — another sign that OpenAI is making a big push into hardware.

• Last year, it brought on Jony Ive — who helped design the iPod, iPhone, and MacBook — to helm a mysterious new hardware project, potentially a “flagship” device that would rival modern smartphones.

• Trademark applications often reference early-stage products that never end up making it to market — so take the specifics with a grain of salt.

2. Startup teaches agents how to collaborate with each other: Three Palantir alums think they can beat the likes of OpenAI, Microsoft, and Google with agents that work together on large projects — delegating tasks and checking each other’s work along the way. With just $5M in pre-seed funding, their UK-based startup, Fern Labs, just showed off some early demos, including one tool that lets multiple agents independently browse the web to build a workspace manager from scratch.

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THE AI ACADEMY

How to analyze Reddit trends with AI

• Go to GummySearch and sign up for an account.

• Click ‘New’, enter a keyword like ‘Artificial Intelligence’, select relevant subreddits, and click ‘Create Audience’. (Add more subreddits later if needed.)

• Search any keyword in custom audience using search box.

Sample Prompt: Best AI tools of 2025

• Select any thread to read the comments or click on ‘Summary’ tab to summarize thread's discussion.

• Click the ‘Themes’ tab for trends.

• To find posts where users seek answers, select ‘Solution Request’ option under ‘Themes’.

• Use ‘Ask’ to ask a custom question about a theme.

Sample Prompt: ‘What are the most common AI image tools people are asking for?’

• You can also do advance search across all of Reddit. Click on ‘Advanced Search’ and select ‘Anyone’ as audience and enter a keyword to search.

• You can analyze Reddit discussions and uncover trends efficiently with this.

(NOTE: You can buy day pass to try all pro features)

FROM THE FRONTIER

Why OpenAI’s deep research tool changes the game

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman thinks ChatGPT’s new deep research tool can “do a single-digit percentage of all economically valuable tasks in the world.” That might not sound like a lot, but think about what it means on a global scale: Even a 1% shift can mean billions or trillions in economic value.

Here are some of the most creative use cases we’ve seen so far:

• Biomedical scientist Derya Unutmaz analyzed a pair of cancer cases he’s working on, and “both reports were simply impeccable, like something only a specialist MD could write.”

• AI educator Mckay Wrigley created a “one-stop daily news report” that’s personalized to the topics and sources he’s interested in.

• Johns Hopkins physician Banda Khalifa was “mind blown” when deep research crafted a comprehensive literature review about the HPV vaccine in under five minutes.

• HubSpot co-founder Dharmesh Shah generated an 11,000-word industry report filled with “genuinely great insights — including some [he] hadn’t really thought of before.”

But there’s some pushback: Critics pointed out that OpenAI apparently swiped the name of Google’s own agentic research tool, which came out over a month ago. The $200/month fee for unlimited access is shutting a lot of people out, too, although OpenAI says it’ll open up access in the next few months as computing gets less expensive.

Stay tuned: Sam Altman teed up yet another surprise, while an employee on OpenAI’s marketing team suggested we can expect that announcement to drop in the next day or two. And it now has some competition, with You.com CEO Richard Socher hinting his company’s next agent is just a week or so away. It can supposedly perform “10x better” than OpenAI’s latest offering.

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AI & TECH NEWS

Everything else you need to know today

🔍 Search Perks: Perplexity can perform web searches with o3-mini, letting you take full advantage of its reasoning capabilities. Free users can perform up to five searches per day, while Pro subscribers will get up to 500.

🛡️ Game On: In order to make Claude more secure, Anthropic is calling on users to see if they can defeat its new jailbreak security system. Your challenge: Try to bypass all three of Claude’s defense shields at the same time. The experiment is live until Feb. 10.

🛣️ Paved Paradise: British researchers teamed up with Google to create a “self-healing” asphalt that can “repair its own cracks over time” with the help of AI, potentially saving the UK millions in maintenance costs.

🗣️ Voice Vault: AI safety nonprofit MLCommons and open-source platform Hugging Face released a dataset of over 1 million hours of audio across 89 languages — a move that could help startups build more sophisticated voice-based AI apps.

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SOCIAL SIGNALS

What’s trending on socials today

😋 Existential Appetite: Sam Altman’s discussion with SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son on Monday veered in an unexpected direction when Son suddenly started contemplating whether a fully sentient AI might ever try to eat us.

🤷 Head Scratcher: As rumors swirl about AI search engine Perplexity potentially acquiring TikTok’s US division, CEO Aravind Srinivas fanned the flames with a cryptic, two-word post. Plus, looks like the company’s got a new acting CSO 👀 

🌠 Meteoric Rise: Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen pointed out that DeepSeek already has about 23% of the daily users as ChatGPT — with far more app downloads — despite releasing just a few weeks ago.

🧑‍💻 Programmer’s Paradise: Builder John Rush compared 24 AI coding agents & IDEs from Cursor to Bolt and shared his finding sin this thread.

💻 AI Obsession: How much AI use is too much? Redditors debated whether “AI addiction [is] a thing“ after one user reported they spend about 20 hours a week talking to chatbots.

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