ChatGPT expands access to ‘Lightweight’ Deep Research tool

Lightweight version of Deep Research is ‘nearly as intelligent’ as regular version.

OpenAI has announced the expansion of its Deep Research artificial intelligence (AI) agent to all ChatGPT users.

The San Francisco-based AI firm announced on Monday, April 28, 2025, that it is now offering a “lightweight” version of the tool to all users on the platform — it was previously limited to paid subscribers.

To note, this version of Deep Research will be powered by the o4-mini AI model and will be available with certain rate limits.

OpenAI’s Deep Research AI agent

Taking to X (formerly Twitter), OpenAI announced the expansion of Deep Research.

With this, the ChatGPT free users will get five lightweight Deep Research queries per month.

ChatGPT Pro users, who earlier had 100 queries per month, will now get 250 queries in the same duration.

Notably, once the regular limit is hit, the queries are automatically switched to the lightweight version.

Users on the Plus and Team plans can make 25 Deep Research queries per month.

Meanwhile, Enterprise and Edu subscribers will get access to this next week, with rate limits similar to the Team plan.

OpenAI stated that the lightweight version of Deep Research is “nearly as intelligent” as the regular version while being cheaper to process.

The company claimed that the quality of the response would not be compromised.

While using the AI agent, users will have to share a primary query. Based on that, ChatGPT will ask questions to narrow the scope of research and understand the primary requirements.

To note, the entire chain of thought (CoT) is visible in a sidebar on the right side.