Comparing deep research offerings

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Thoughts on Deep Research from OpenAI ($200/month) vs Gemini vs Perplexity GPT Deep Research (DR) with o3-mini-high has the best, most verbose writing. If you're learning a new topic from scratch, this is the best option. If you already know what you're looking for and you need more detail, the same verbosity cuts the other way. If you're looking for simple prompting, this is also often the best option - the questions you're asked before research starts is a simple but massively useful feature that help guide things a lot better. It's also the second slowest, and pretty comparable in number of sources to the other ones. Also the most expensive by 10x. It's definitely not 10x better. Perplexity DR is surprisingly good. Pretty close in sources - and picks up some things that the other ones miss. I wish the output was longer (694 words compared to openai's 2462 words). It's also the fastest of the bunch - I had time to ask three more questions in the time that the other tools took to finish. This is what I'd use if I'm inside my areas of expertise. Perplexity (once you have the initial research) is also pretty good if you switch the model to o3 and ask for more elaboration. Improves the results. Gemini is the surprising underperformer. You'd think Google would dominate this space simply by virtue of the fact that they have direct access to the world's largest search index, while everyone else has to live with SERP summaries and Google queries - but somehow Gemini DR (perhaps because of the 1.5 pro model still being used) falls quite short. Unless you're getting this one for free, not much point.