[zoogeny]

I'm curious what kind of research people are doing that takes 45 minutes of LLM time. Is this a poke at the McKinsey consultant domain?

Perhaps I am just frivolous with my own time, but I tend to use LLMs in a more iterative way for research. I get partial answers, probe for more information, direct the attention of the LLM away from areas I am familiar and towards areas I am less familiar. I feel if I just let it loose for 45 minutes it would spend too much time on areas I do not find valuable.

This seems more like a play for "replacement" rather than "augmentation". Although, I suppose if I had infinite wealth, I could kick of 10+ research agents each taking 45 minutes and then review their output as it became available, then kick off round 2, etc. That is, I could do my process but instead of interactively I could do it asynchronously.

[throwup238]

That iterative research process is exactly how I use Google Deep Research since it has a 20/day rate limit. Research a problem, notice some off hand assumption or remark the report made, and fire off another research run asking about it. It depends on what you work on; in my use case I often have to do hours of research for 30 minutes of work like when integrating a bunch of different vendors’ APIs or pouring over datasheets for EE, so it’s worth firing off research and then working on something else for 10-20 minutes (it helps that the Gemini app fires off a push notification when the report is done - Anthropic please do this! Even for requests made from the web app).

As for long research times, one thing I’ve been using it for is historical research on old books. Gemini DeepResearch was the first one able to properly explain the nuances of identifying a chimeral first edition Origin of Species after taking half an hour and reading 400 sources. It went into all the important details like spelling errors and the properties of chimeral FY2** copies found in various libraries around the world.