Deep Research Agents

TL;DR for operators A deep-research agent does not become substantially cheaper merely because its final writing context is smaller. The study behind Not Worth Another Token: Marginal Value Estimation for Efficient Deep Research Agents finds that much larger savings appear when low-value evidence is removed earlier, before it can cause additional retrieval, processing, and branch expansion.1 ...

A research report is not an answer with extra paragraphs. That sounds obvious until an enterprise team tries to evaluate a deep research agent by asking whether its final conclusion looks plausible, whether it included citations, and whether the prose sounded confident enough to survive a board deck. Congratulations: the machine has produced something that resembles diligence. Whether it actually performed diligence is the inconvenient question. ...