Early thoughts on OpenAI Deep Research
The Knowledge Navigator was not billed as an AI. Instead it was a hardware device, resembling an iPad, except that in Apple’s vision at the time, it would lie flat on the user’s desk. Running on that hardware was a virtual assistant (a man in a bowtie—I think I will always imagine our best AIs wearing bowties because of this). The virtual assistant could place and screen video calls on the user’s behalf, synthesize large quantities of academic research and other online content, and even use that information to create new knowledge. Apple imagined that you’d communicate with this device almost entirely through voice. The Knowledge Navigator was not just a computer; it was a colleague.
The Knowledge Navigator is now here, and I am indeed using it on a future-generation Macintosh. But the Navigator itself is not made by Apple; it’s a product called Deep Research from OpenAI. Deep Research is not entirely Apple’s vision; I cannot have fluid conversations with it yet (though I can with GPT-4o using Advanced Voice Mode), for example. But for all intents and purposes, the parts of Knowledge Navigator I cared about for decades have arrived.
