Has it been three months since OpenAI released Deep Research? Really? On February 2, 2025, ChatGPT gained an ability called Deep Research.
Given a prompt, Deep Research would reach out across the web to search out and analyze reams of sources, then use it to create a “comprehensive report at the level of a research analyst,” in OpenAI’s words.
“It accomplishes in tens of minutes what would take a human many hours,” the company said at the time of launching it. The downside was that once it compiled this allegedly super-useful report, you had to clumsily screenshot it or copy/paste it into an ugly Word document to save it.
Until today, with the addition of one little “Download as PDF” button that makes a world of difference.
a simple change, but a badly needed one
Deep Research itself could interpret and analyze PDFs, alongside text and images. It just couldn’t produce a nice-looking report, and even all these years later, PDFs are the standard for documents that need to look polished and professional.
When all you could do was screenshot or copy/paste the reports generated by Deep Research, though, you ended up with some spectacularly ugly documents, especially when your Deep Research report contained tables, charts, images, and graphs. So much for your “professional report.”
As a sweetener, the “Download as PDF” button works not just for new Deep Research reports dedicated today and afterward, but it also works for older reports in your history. If you had Deep Research whip you up a well presented report last week, only to save it in a jumbled, jury-rigged format as ugly as sin, you can go back into your ChatGPT history and export it as a PDF.
Yet as useful as the “Download as PDF” capability is, only Plus, Team, and Pro subscribers get it initially. Enterprise, Edu, and Free users don’t get it. Perhaps somebody can ask Deep Research to put together a well thought-out, comprehensive report on the benefits of expanding this capability to all ChatGPT users.
Somebody who pays for ChatGPT Plus, Team, or Pro.
The post ChatGPT Deep Research Finally Got the Ability to Export PDFs appeared first on VICE.
