Hugging Face Develops Open Alternative to OpenAI's Research Tool

# ai # openai # Open AI

A team of developers at Hugging Face, including co-founder and chief scientist Thomas Wolf, have created what they call an "open" version of OpenAI's deep research tool. OpenAI introduced deep research at a recent event, where it was revealed that the tool scours the web to generate research reports on any topic. However, access to deep research is currently restricted to those subscribed to OpenAI's $200-per-month ChatGPT Pro plan. The Hugging Face team's project, dubbed Open Deep Research, leverages OpenAI's o1 model alongside an open-source "agentic framework." This framework assists the model in planning its analysis and directs it to utilize tools like search engines. Although o1 is a proprietary model accessible only through a paid API, the team claims it outperforms other "open" models, such as DeepSeek's R1. Within just 24 hours, the researchers managed to use o1 with a basic text-based browser and a "text inspector" toolkit to access files across the web. According to the team, Open Deep Research can navigate the web on its own, scroll through pages, handle files, and perform calculations with data. On the GAIA benchmark for general AI assistants, Open Deep Research scored 54%, while OpenAI's deep research achieved a higher score of 67.36%. I attempted to use Open Deep Research through the public demo the team provided, but encountered issues. The page was experiencing heavy traffic at the time of publication, and after waiting for 10 minutes, I received an error message. Despite this, the researchers are dedicated to enhancing the tool and have shared the source code on GitHub for community review and feedback. It's worth mentioning that several "reproductions" of OpenAI's deep research exist online, some of which use open models and tools. However, a key element missing from these alternatives, including Open Deep Research, is o3, the model that powers deep research. Few, if any, models surpass o3 in benchmarks for answering complex questions and gathering information. Without an open model comparable to o3, these alternatives might not fully match up to the original. *Interested in AI? Subscribe to TechCrunch's AI-focused newsletter, delivered to your inbox every Wednesday.*

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