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.

Yes, but I think my previous point still matter, namely what exact model is being used greatly affects the results.

So without specifying which model is being used, it's really hard to know what is better than something else, because we don't understand what the underlying model is, and if it's better because of the model itself, or the tooling, which feels like an important distinction.