📚 Deep Research & AI in Education: A Game-Changer?

What if you could generate an entire research paper in minutes at the level of a PhD student? AI tools are now making this possible with a new feature called Deep Research.

Unlike a typical response on AI search tools, the Deep Research feature takes a far more thorough approach. It pulls from dozens of sources, analyzes them in detail, and delivers an in-depth report within minutes. It takes a bit longer to generate results, but in return, you get a report with a much deeper analysis and an explanation of its reasoning process, rather than a simple chat output.

This has the potential to be a game-changer for students and researchers. But what does it mean for education? Will it help students learn better, or will it negatively impact students’ critical thinking skills? In this edition, we’ll take a closer look at what Deep Research tools can do, how they work, and some of their limitations.

Here is an overview of today’s newsletter:

• Overview of the Deep Research feature across three major AI models

• The latest stats on AI perspectives among students, educators, and parents

• Interview with a graduate student researcher at Stanford investigating knowledge-building interactions between students and LLMs

• Results from the most comprehensive and large-scale global survey of 23,218 higher education students from 109 countries on their perceptions of ChatGPT

🚀 Practical AI Usage and Policies

Deep Research is becoming a key feature in major AI tools, with OpenAI, Perplexity, and Google Gemini all recently rolling out their versions of this feature. The feature works similarly across all three models. Instead of simply summarizing texts, they pull information from a wide range of sources, analyzing and reasoning through each of them, before outputting a comprehensive report that engages deeply with the material.

However, they also have their limitations. They sometimes hallucinate facts and are restricted to relying on publicly available sources and research papers, excluding paywalled content. Also, despite their name, their analysis is not as deep as that of a true expert but is more comparable to the level of a first-year PhD student.

Below is an overview of the Deep Research feature across these three models. Try them out for yourself and let us know your thoughts in the comments below!

Perplexity Deep Research

Below is an example report generated by Perplexity:

You can try this feature out for free by going