US tech giant OpenAI on Monday unveiled a ChatGPT tool called "deep research" ahead of high-level meetings in Tokyo, as China's DeepSeek chatbot heats up competition in the AI field.
Artificial intelligence newcomer DeepSeek has sent Silicon Valley into a frenzy, with its high performance and supposed low cost prompting calls for US developers to go faster.
OpenAI, whose ChatGPT fronted generative AI's emergence into public consciousness in 2022, said its new tool "accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours".
"Deep research is OpenAI's next agent that can do work for you independently -- you give it a prompt, and ChatGPT will find, analyze, and synthesize hundreds of online sources to create a comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst," it said in a statement.
In a livestreamed video announcement, OpenAI researchers showed how the tool can synthesise web search data to help recommend ski equipment to buy for a snow holiday in Japan.
OpenAI chief Sam Altman is in Tokyo to meet Japan's Prime Minister Shigeru Ishiba later Monday along with Masayoshi Son, head of Japanese tech investment behemoth SoftBank Group.