In a duel with DeepSeek

OpenAI strengthens itself with AI tool and new alliance

After the DeepSeek shock, the US pioneer of artificial intelligence, OpenAI, is going on the attack. In competition with the hype AI from China, it presented a tool for complex searches - and announced an alliance with the Japanese tech investor Softbank.

OpenAI and SoftBank will be working together in the AI sector in future: A joint venture in Japan will offer corresponding services for corporate customers, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son said on Monday. He had agreed on this with OpenAI boss Sam Altman.

SoftBank to pay three billion a year
The investment giant will also pay three billion dollars a year to use OpenAI's technology in SoftBank Group companies. The group wants to become OpenAI's largest financial investor and, as was announced last week, is negotiating an investment of up to 25 billion dollars with the ChatGPT developer.

SoftBank is also providing 15 billion dollars for the recently announced "Stargate" project to expand the digital AI infrastructure in the USA, in which Microsoft, Oracle, Nvidia and the Softbank subsidiary Arm are also involved alongside OpenAI.

New AI tool "Deep Research" unveiled
On Sunday, OpenAI also unveiled a new AI tool called "Deep Research". According to the company, the program is able to research complex tasks on the internet in several steps. "It can do in a few minutes what would take a human many hours," says OpenAI.

The AI start-up added that "Deep Research" is still in its infancy and therefore has its limits. For example, the program may have difficulties distinguishing credible information from rumors. "Deep Research" is powered by a version of the OpenAI o3 model, which is optimized for web browsing and data analysis, according to OpenAI.