Isn't OpenIA "Deep research" (not "DeepResearch") a methodology/tooling thing, and you'll get different responses depending on what specific model you use with it? As far as the UI allows you to, you could use Deep research with GPT-5, GPT-4o, o3 and so on, and that'll have an impact on the responses. Skimming the paper and searching for some simple terms makes it seem like they never expand on what exact models they've used, just that they've used a specific feature from ChatGPT?

At this point "deep research" is more of a pattern - OpenAI and Perplexity and Google Gemini all offer products with that name which work essentially the same way, and Anthropic and Grok have similar products with a slightly different name attached.

The pattern is effectively long-running research tasks that drive a search tool. You give them a prompt, they churn away for 5-10 minutes running searches and they output a report (with "citations") at the end.

This Tongyi model has been fine-tuned to be really good at using its search tool in a loop to produce a report.