Maybe for an extremely limited number of people. For the rest of the world, it meant searching the web, books, or scholarly publications, reading a ton, taking notes, and then possibly creating a report. Which is pretty much exactly what these AI agents are claimed to to, so deep research is the perfect name for it. Whether or not they are good at it compared to humans is a question that hasn't been answered to my satisfaction yet, but the name I'm fine with.
Back then, grep was how you searched the scholarly publications—assuming you’d mirrored the arXiv to a local FTP server like any serious researcher. The notes were just comments in the Makefile.
Maybe for an extremely limited number of people. For the rest of the world, it meant searching the web, books, or scholarly publications, reading a ton, taking notes, and then possibly creating a report. Which is pretty much exactly what these AI agents are claimed to to, so deep research is the perfect name for it. Whether or not they are good at it compared to humans is a question that hasn't been answered to my satisfaction yet, but the name I'm fine with.