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Open Deep Research
- tkellogg 2y agoit's just an example, but it's great to see smolagents in practice. I wonder how well the import whitelist approach works for code interpreter security.
- tptacek 2y agoI know some of the point of this is running things locally, but for agent workflows like this some of this seems like a solved problem: just run it on a throwaway VM. There's lots of ways to do that quickly.
- ATechGuy 2y agoVM is not the right abstraction because of performance and resource requirements. VMs are used because nothing exists that provides same or better isolation. Using a throwaway VM for each AI agent would be highly inefficient (think wasted compute and other resources, which is the opposite of what DeepSeek exemplified).
- tptacek 2y agoTo which performance and resource requirements are you referring? A cloud VM runs as long as the agent runs, then stops running.
- ATechGuy 2y agoI mean performance overheads of an OS process running in a VM to (vs no VM) and additional resource requirements for running a VM, including memory and additional kernel. You can pull relevant numbers from academic papers.
- vineyardmike 2y agoIs “DeepSeek” going to be the new trendy way to say to not be wasteful? I don’t think DS is a good example here. Mostly because it’s a trendy thing, and the company still has $1B in capex spend to get there. Firecracker has changed the nature of “VMs” into something cheap and easy to spin up and throw away while maintaining isolation. There’s no reason not to use it (besides complexity, I guess). Besides, the entire rest of this is a python notebook. With headless browsers. Using LLMs. This is entirely setting silicon on fire. The overhead from a VM the least of the compute efficiency problems. Just hit a quick cloud API and run your python or browser automation in isolation and move on.
- cma 2y agoThe rise of captchas on regular content, no longer just for posting content, could ruin this. Cloudflare and other companies have set things up to go through a few hand selected scrapers and only they will be able to offer AI browsing and research services.
- AznHisoka 2y agoWhat about Cloudflare itself? It might constitute an abuse of sorts of their leadership position, but couldn’t they dominate the AI research/agent market if they wanted? (Or maybe that’s what you were implying too)
- tptacek 2y agoI think the opposite problem is going to occur with captchas for whatever it's worth: LLMs are going to obsolete them. It's an arms race where the defender has a huge constraint the attacker doesn't (pissing off real users); in that way, it's kind of like the opposite dynamics that password hashes exploit.
- anon373839 2y agoI’m not sure about that. There’s a lot of runway left for obstacles that are easy for humans and hard/impossible for AI, such as direct manipulation puzzles. (AI models have latency that would be impossible to mask.) On the other hand, a11y needs do limit what can be lawfully deployed…
- pixl97 2y ago>AI models have latency So do humans, or can my friend with cerebral palsy not use the internet any longer?
- anon373839 2y agoTotally different type of latency. A person with a motor disability dragging a puzzle piece with their finger will look very different from an AI model being called frame by frame.
- lasermike026 2y agoI think I'm in love.
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- transpute 2y agohttps://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/hugging-face-researchers-aim-to-build-an-open-version-of-openais-deep-research-tool/ https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/04/hugging-face-researchers-a... > On GAIA, a benchmark for general AI assistants, Open Deep Research achieves a score of 54%. That’s compared with OpenAI deep research’s score of 67.36%..Worth noting is that there are a number of OpenAI deep research “reproductions” on the web, some of which rely on open models and tooling. The crucial component they — and Open Deep Research — lack is o3, the model underpinning deep research. Blog post, https://huggingface.co/blog/open-deep-research https://huggingface.co/blog/open-deep-research
- swyx 2y agotheres always a lot of openTHING clones of THING after THING is announced. they all usually (not always[1]!) disappoint/dont get traction. i think the causes are 1. running things in production/self hosting is more annoying than just paying like 20-200/month 2. openTHING makers often overhype their superficial repros ("I cloned Perplexity in a weekend! haha! these VCs are clowns!") and trivializing the last mile, most particularly in this case... 3. long horizon planning trained with RL in a tight loop that is not available in the open (yes, even with deepseek). the thing that makes OAI work as a product+research company is that products are never launched without first establishing a "prompted baseline" and then finetuning the model from there (we covered this process in https://latent.space/p/karina https://latent.space/p/karina recently) - which becomes an evals/dataset suite that eventually gets merged in once performance impacts stabilize 4. that said, smolagents and HF are awesome and I like that they are always this on the ball. how does this make money for HF? --- [1]: i think opendevin/allhands is a pretty decent competitor to devin now
- tshepom 2y agoMaybe these open projects start to get more attention when we have a distribution system/App Store for AI projects. I know YC is looking to fund this https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs https://www.ycombinator.com/rfs
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- rvz 2y agoOf course. The first of many open source versions of 'Deep Research' projects are now appearing as predicted [0] but in less than a month. Faster than expected. Open source is already at the finish line. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913379 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42913379
- transpute 2y ago> Nothing that Perplexity + DeepSeek-R1 can already do Any public comparisons of OAI Deep Research report quality with Perplexity + DeepSeek-R1, on the same query? How do cost and query limits compare?
- lhl 2y agoI've been using GenSpark.ai for the past month to do research (its agents usually does ~20 minutes, but I've seen it go up to almost 2 hours on a task) - it uses a Mixture of Agents approach using GPT-4o, Claude 3.5 Sonnet and Gemini 1.5 Pro and searches for hundreds of sources. I reran some of these searches and I've so far found OpenAI Deep Research to be superior for technical tasks. Here's one example: https://chatgpt.com/share/67a10f6d-28cc-8012-bf98-05dcdb705cbf https://chatgpt.com/share/67a10f6d-28cc-8012-bf98-05dcdb705c... vs https://www.genspark.ai/agents?id=c896d5bc-321b-46ca-9aaa-62cebcdd3e76 https://www.genspark.ai/agents?id=c896d5bc-321b-46ca-9aaa-62... I've been giving Deep Research a good workout, although I'm still mystified if switching between the different base model matters, besides o1 pro always seeming to fail to execute the Deep Research tool.
- Terretta 2y ago> still mystified if switching between the different base model matters, besides o1 pro always seeming to fail to execute the Deep Research tool. You mean when it says it's going to research and get back to you and then ... just doesn't?
- lhl 2y agoYeah, it seems to not be able to execute the tool calling properly. Maybe it's a bad interaction w/ it's own async calling ability or something else (eg, how search and code interpreter can't seem to run at the same time for 4o)
- bossyTeacher 2y agoSo basically, Altman announced Deep Research less than a month ago and open-source alternatives are already out? Investors are not going to be happy unless OpenAI outperforms them all by an order of magnitude
- mrtesthah 2y agoWasn’t this technique previewed by Google Gemini 2.0 first?
- energy123 2y agoYou're being slippery with language. The open source version doesn't get 26% on Humanity's Last Exam. It's not "already out".
- taurknaut 2y ago> Humanity's Last Exam Good grief, AI researchers need to learn basic humility if they want to market their tech successfully. Unless they're toppling our states and liberating us from capital (extremely difficult to imagine) I have a difficult time imagining any value or threat AI could provide that necessitates this level of drama.
- sReinwald 2y agoConstantly warning about how your product is or will eventually be so powerful that it will become a danger to humanity or society is the successful marketing. And for the big AI companies, like OpenAI, it has the very beneficial side-effect of establishing the narrative that lets them influence politics into regulating their potential competitors out of the market. Because they are, of course, the only reasonable and responsible builders of self-described doomsday devices.
- flaviuspopan 2y agoI signed up for Gemini Advanced to get access to Deep Research on Feb 1st and felt on top of the world. So cool, so advanced. Then OpenAI announced theirs on the 2nd: https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ https://openai.com/index/introducing-deep-research/ Ethan Mollick called Google's undergraduate level and OpenAI's graduate level on the 3rd: https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-end-of-search-the-beginning-of https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/the-end-of-search-the-begin... And now this. I can't stop thinking about The Onion Movie's "Bates 4000" clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JCOBPMIgAA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JCOBPMIgAA
- gmerc 2y agoMollik is the great sense-maker. Whatever he says is usually wrong
- brcmthrowaway 2y agoMy X feed is 90% AI Influencers like this saying "I'm blown away! Check this out.." Is this a new cottage industry? Are they making money?
- egillie 2y agoI’ve heard it’s all the crypto influencers jumping into the AI hype
- lysecret 2y agoYea x and YouTube. Also the YouTube meta specifically seems to have moved to these sensationalist over exaggeration and over simplification. Really would be nice to have a sensibility filter somehow. It’s gonna come with ai.
- gusmally 2y agoI like AI Explained on Youtube for non-sensationalist and thoughtful takes: https://www.youtube.com/@aiexplained-official https://www.youtube.com/@aiexplained-official
- aubanel 2y agoHi all! Aymeric (m-ric) here, maintainer of smolagents and part of the team who built this. Happy to see this interesting people here! Few points: - open Deep Research is not a production app, but it could easily be productionized (would need to be faster + good UX). - As the GAIA score of 55% (not 54%, that would be lame) says, it's not far from the Deep Research score of 67%. It's also not there yet: I think the main point of progress is to improve web browsing. We're working on integrating vision models (for now we've used a text browser developed by the Microsofit autogen team, congrats to them) because it's probably the best way to really interact with webpages. - Open Deep Research is built on smolagents, a library that we're building, for which the core is having agents that write their actions (tool calls) in code snippets instead of the unpractical JSON blobs + parsing that everyone incl OpenAI and Anthropic use for their agentic/tool-calling APIs. Don't hesitate to go try out the lib and drop issues/PRs! - smolagents does code execution, which means "danger for your machine" if ran locally. We've railguardeed that a bit with our custom python interpreter, but it will never be 100% safe, so we're enabling remote execution with E2B and soon Docker.
- davidsojevic 2y agoGreat work on this, Aymeric and team! In terms of improving browsing and/or data sources, do you think it might be worth integrating things like Google Scholar search capability to increase the depth of some of the research that can be done? It's something I'd be happy to explore a bit if it's of interest.
- aubanel 2y agoThat's a good idea! Could be a very nice tool to add to the lib!
- transpute 2y ago> smolagents does code execution, which means "danger for your machine" if ran locally. We've railguardeed that a bit with our custom python interpreter, but it will never be 100% safe, so we're enabling remote execution with E2B and soon Docker. Those remote interfaces may also work with local VMs for isolation.
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- yobid20 2y agoWe need an OpenOpenAI to open source OpenAI who should actually be called ClosedAI, since there's nothing open about them other than their banks to take all your money.
- taurknaut 2y agoSomehow "deep" has acquired the connotation of "bullshit". It's a shame—I'm very bullish on LLM technology, but capital seems determined to diminish every angle of potential by blatantly lying about its capabilities. Granted, this isn't an entrepreneurial venture, so maybe it has some value. but this still stinks to high heaven of saving money rather than producing value. One day we'll see AI produce stuff of value that humans can't already do better (aside from playing board games), but that day is still a long way off.