> - Deep Research (very powerful, but I have only 10 attempts per month, so I end up using roughly zero)
Same here, which is a real shame. I've switched to DeepResearch with Gemini 2.5 Pro over the last few days where paid users have a 20/day limit instead of 10/month and it's been great, especially since now Gemini seems to browse 10x more pages than OpenAI Deep Research (on the order of 200-400 pages versus 20-40).
The reports are too verbose but having it research random development ideas, or how to do something particularly complex with a specific library, or different approaches or architectures to a problem has been very productive without sliding into vibe coding territory.
Wow, I wondered what the limit was. I never checked, but I've been using it hesitantly since I burn up OpenAI's limit as soon as it resets. Thanks for the clarity.
I'm all-in on Deep Research. It can conduct research on niche historical topics that have no central articles in minutes, which typically were taking me days or weeks to delve into.
I like Deep Research but as a historian I have to tell you. I've used it for history themes to calibrated my expectations and it is a nice tool but... It can easily brush over nuanced discussions and just return folk wisdom from blogs.
What I love most about history is it has lots of irreducible complexity and poring over the literature, both primary and secondary sources, is often the only way to develop an understanding.
I read Being and Time recently and it has a load of concepts that are defined iteratively. There's a lot wrong with how it's written but it's an unfinished book written a 100 years ago so, I cant complain too much.
Because it's quite long, if I asked Perplexity* to remind me what something meant, it would very rarely return something helpful, but, to be fair, I cant really fault it for being a bit useless with a very difficult to comprehend text, where there are several competing styles of reading, many of whom are convinced they are correct.
But I started to notice a pattern of where it would pull answers from some weird spots, especially when I asked it to do deep research. Like, a paper from a University's server that's using concepts in the book to ground qualitative research, which is fine and practical explications are often useful ways into a dense concept, but it's kinda a really weird place to be the first initial academic source. It'll draw on Reddit a weird amount too, or it'll somehow pull a page of definitions from a handout for some University tutorial. And it wont default to the peer reviewed free philosophy encyclopedias that are online and well known.
It's just weird. I was just using it to try and reinforce my actual reading of the text but I more came away thinking that in certain domains, this end of AI is allowing people to conflate having access to information, with learning about something.
*it's just what I have access to.
If you're asking an LLM about a particular text, even if it's a well-known text, you might get significantly better results if you provide said text as part of your prompt (context) instead of asking a model to "recall it from memory".
So something like this: "Here's a PDF file containing Being and Time. Please explain the significance of anxiety (Angst) in the uncovering of Being."
When I've wanted it to not do things like this, I've had good luck directing it to... not look at those sources.
For example when I've wanted to understand an unfolding story better than the news, I've told it to ignore the media and go only to original sources (e.g. speech transcripts, material written by the people involved, etc.)
Deep Search is pretty good for current news stories. I've had it analyze some legal developments in a European nation recently and it gave me a great overview.
That use case seems pretty self defeating when a good news source will usually try to at least validate first-party materials which an llm cannot do.
LLMs seem fantastic at generalizing broad thought and is not great at outliers. It sort of smooths over the knowledge curve confidently, which is a bit like in psychology where only CBT therapy is accepted, even if there are many much more highly effectual methodologies on individuals, just not at the population level.
Interesting use case. My problem is that for niche subjects the crawled pages probably have not captured the information and the response becomes irrelevant. Perhaps gemini will produce better results just because it takes into account much more pages
I also like Perplexity’s 3/day limit! If I use them up (which I almost never do) I can just refresh the next day
I've only ever had to use DeepResearch for academic literature review. What do you guys use it for which hits your quotas so quickly?
I use it for mundane shit that I don’t want to spend hours doing.
My son and I go to a lot of concerts and collect patches. Unfortunately we started collecting long after we started going to concerts.
I had a list of about 30 bands I wanted patches for.
I was able to give precise instructions on what I wanted. Deep research came back with direct links for every patch I wanted.
It took me two minutes to write up the prompt and it did all the heavy lifting.
Write a comparison between X and Y
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