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Comment by j_bum | Hacker News Reader

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j_bum·

Is this the “Web Search”, “Deep Research”, or “Agent Mode” feature of ChatGPT?

Navigating their feature set is… fun.

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It's not the Deep Search or Agent Mode.

I select "GPT-5 Thinking" from the model picker and make sure its regular search tool is enabled.

Good to know, I’ll try to just use this a bit more then. I always opt for one of the above modes, with varying degrees of success.

Not sure if you tend to edit your posts, but it could be worth clarifying.

Btw — my colleagues and I all love your posts. I’ll quit fanboying now lol.

> This is excellent for satisfying curiosity, and occasionally useful for more important endeavors as well.

Small nit, Simon: satisfying curiosity is the important endeavor.

It feels like the difference between someone painstakingly brushing away eons of dirt and calcification on buried dino bones vs just picking them up off the ground.

In the former, the research feels genuine and in the latter it feels hollow and probably fake.

In my experience it’s “search Reddit and combine comments”.

There are searches where that is the best way for a human to get the answer too. It can also search the Internet Archive if you ask for historical details, so does it not just do what a good human researcher would do?

I have a feeling this is just ChatGPT 5 in thinking mode, with web search enabled at a profile level at least. Even without that, any indication for recent data or research and thinking will prompt it to think+research quite a bit, ie deep research.

I believe this is just the normal mode. In my experience, you don't have to select the web search option to make it search the web. I wonder why they have web search as an option at this point (to force the llm to search?)

Don't forget about the "ChatGPT 5 Pro" too :) which is a bit like Deep Research but not quite?

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