OpenAI announces new 'deep research' tool for ChatGPT

US tech giant OpenAI on Monday unveiled a ChatGPT tool called "deep research" ahead of high-level meetings in Tokyo, as China's DeepSeek chatbot heats up competition in the AI field.

Artificial intelligence newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with its supposed low cost and high performance prompting calls for US developers to go faster.

OpenAI, whose ChatGPT fronted generative AI's emergence into public consciousness in 2022, said its new tool "accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours".

"Deep research is OpenAI's next agent that can do work for you independently – you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst," it said in a statement.

In a livestreamed video announcement, OpenAI researchers showed how the tool can synthesise web search data to help recommend which ski equipment to buy for a snow holiday in Japan.

OpenAI chief Sam Altman is in Tokyo to meet Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba later on Monday along with Masayoshi Son, head of Japanese tech investment behemoth SoftBank Group.

SoftBank and OpenAI are part of the Stargate drive announced by US President Donald Trump to invest up to $500 billion in artificial intelligence infrastructure in the United States.

Son attended Trump's inauguration, which was followed by an announcement that SoftBank would lead the project to build AI infrastructure in the US, along with cloud giant Oracle.

Ishiba is expected to visit Washington to meet Trump for the leaders' first in-person meeting later this week.