AI assisted search-based research actually works now
AI Summary
Simon Willison's April 2025 verdict that AI-assisted search-based research has finally crossed from disappointing to genuinely useful, after two-plus years of skepticism. He compares Deep Research implementations from Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Perplexity against the newer search-enabled o3/o4-mini models (which run searches inline during chain-of-thought reasoning), argues Google and Anthropic's search integrations lag behind, and gives a concrete example of using o4-mini-high to port code to a new SDK via live search.
Original excerpt
For the past two and a half years the feature I've most wanted from LLMs is the ability to take on search-based research tasks on my behalf. We saw the first glimpses of this back in early 2023, with Perplexity (first launched December 2022, first prompt leak in January 2023) and then the GPT-4 powered Microsoft Bing (which launched/cratered spectacularly in February 2023). Since then a whole bunch of people have taken a swing at this problem, most notably Google Gemini and ChatGPT Search.
Those 2023-era versions were promising but very disappointing. They had a strong tendency to hallucinate details that weren't present in the search results, to the point that you couldn't trust anything…
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Simon Willison's April 2025 verdict that AI-assisted search-based research has finally crossed from disappointing to genuinely useful, after two-plus years of skepticism. He compares Deep Research implementations from Google Gemini, OpenAI, and Perplexity against the newer search-enabled o3/o4-mini…
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"AI assisted search-based research actually works now" was written by Simon Willison. It is curated in the AI Deep Research vault on Burn 451, which covers ai research agents & methodology.
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