OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently praised Perplexity AI CEO Aravind Srinivas for creating a rival Deep Research tool based on China’s DeepSeek AI, following OpenAI’s release of its own Deep Research feature for ChatGPT. While OpenAI’s Deep Research aims to offer more accuracy, Srinivas’s version is positioned as faster and cheaper, though slightly less precise.

The exchange began when Altman announced a new update for ChatGPT based on the GPT-4o model, which he called “pretty good” and noted would soon improve. “we put out an update to chatgpt (4o). it is pretty good. it is soon going to get much better, team is cooking.” Altman wrote on X.

Srinivas responded with curiosity, asking, “Sorry, what’s the update?” To which Altman clarified, “among many other things, it’s the best search product on the web! check it out and lmk what you think.”

In response, Srinivas, excited about Perplexity’s own Deep Research, cheekily replied, “lol, i just mogged you yday, check this out,” linking to a post about the launch of Deep Research for Perplexity.

Instead of reacting negatively, Altman referenced a conversation that likely took place at the Paris AI Summit, noting he would let it go since Srinivas had personally apologized to him for past “mean tweets.” “Since you nicely apologized to me in person for all the mean tweets last week, im going to let this go 🙂 keep cooking out there! proud of you,” Altman wrote.

Deep Research on Perplexity vs ChatGPT

Perplexity’s Deep Research tool conducts multiple searches, reads hundreds of sources, and processes the information much like a human researcher, then generates a clear, comprehensive report that can be shared or exported as a PDF. Although Perplexity acknowledges its tool lags behind ChatGPT in accuracy according to the Humanity’s Last Exam rankings, it claims to outperform competitors like Gemini Thinking, o3-Mini, Grok 2, and Claude 3.5 Sonnet on the same benchmark.

While Perplexity’s Deep Research may fall short in accuracy, Srinivas argues it is “an order of magnitude faster and cheaper” than ChatGPT’s offering. Additionally, Perplexity provides 500 queries per day for paid users, compared to ChatGPT’s 100 queries for Pro users, with limited queries available for free users.