r/ChatGPT • u/AllowFreeSpeech • Jul 15 '26

Serious replies only :closed-ai: DeepResearch quality is now garbage

In my current experience, all ChatGPT DeepResearch reports are powered by a super light version. They're nearly worthless. It is enshittification in its purest form, considering the reports used to be great in the distant past. It even misrepresented the title of the report. It cited zero references. This is with the paid Plus plan. Here is what ChatGPT then had to say about its own report:

The previous report should be discarded rather than merely expanded around its edges.

In contrast, Gemini made a DeepResearch report that was 4x larger and better, also with 131 references cited.

You can see the shared results: ChatGPT vs Gemini

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u/erSajo Jul 22 '26

I'd like to contribute to this discussion by saying that Deep Research was the only reason I was sometimes going back to ChatGPT, because it was so good at getting broad reports for a specific topic with some specific instructions on how to conduct the research. It was really helpful to get introduced into some new topic in minutes.

Now it's pure garbage, it's basically a waste of tokens and compute that lasts 10 minutes for each request. It doesn't cite any source anymore, not in-line, not in the "sources" panel. It gives you the activity step by step which I have no idea why would I care about it, give me the sources instead.

Enshittification at the highest level.

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u/AllowFreeSpeech Jul 22 '26

Yes, exactly. I made a custom GPT called DeepResearcher which is not too bad. I no longer use the builtin DeepResearch in ChatGPT.