It's a direction in a vast landscape, not a feature of itself - being better at different tasks, like search generally, and research in conjunction with reasoning, gets the model closer to AGI. An AGI will be able to do these tasks - so the point of the research is to have more Venn diagrams of capabilities like these to help narrow down the view on things that might actually be fundamental mechanisms involved in AGI.

Moravec detailed the idea of a landscape of human capabilities slowly being submerged by AI capabilities, and the point at which AI can do anything a human can, in practice or in principle, we'll know for certain we've reached truly general AI. This idea includes things like feeling pain and pleasure, planning, complex social, oral, and ethical dynamics, and anything else you can possibly think of as relevant to human intelligence. Deep Research is just another island being slowly submerged by the relentless and relentlessly accelerating flood.