Take a pinch of Gemini, add in a dash of ChatGPT, sprinkle in a dusting of Perplexity—and this is what you get

Everywhere you look these days, there it is—some manner of breathlessly hyped new “AI” service that’s, like, totally gonna change your life forever. (Like, totally. For realsies.)

Or so they say. In reality, of course, most of this stuff is far more fallible, limited in utility, and inadvisable to use outside of super-specific scenarios than most tech companies (and self-declared “AI gurus”) would lead you to believe.

But AI, in its current form, isn’t entirely useless. Far from it, in fact: This type of tech can be quite helpful in the right sort of scenario and, critically, if you think about it in the right way—not as an end-all instant answer machine but as a starting point for certain types of specific tasks or info-seeking.

And as we wade our way through a year that’s absolutely overflowing with overwrought AI ballyhoo, I’ve got just the tool for you to sift through that sea and seek out some surprising shiny pearls amid all the overwhelming noise.

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Deep research, done right

So, you’ve probably heard all about ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and the likes, right?

They’re all generative AI chatbots, which means they use a snazzy-sounding word prediction engine to analyze language patterns and answer your questions, among other more ambitious tasks.

🔎 One of their biggest recent advancements is the ability to perform what everyone’s calling “deep research”—a fancy way of saying they’ll dive deep into a topic for you and create a detailed report of info, almost like a custom-made dossier, based on knowledge from all over the web.

Again, I can’t emphasize enough: The info here isn’t infallible. These systems can—and do—get stuff wrong and sometimes even flat-out make up nonsense out of thin air.

🧠 But, as a starting point—especially when they include links to their sources so you can confirm info on your own and use it as an entryway to research as opposed to the final product—it really can save you time and give you a great way to get into a complex topic.

And the tool I want to show to you today makes that feature far more powerful, useful, and also affordable than it’s ever been before.

⌚ It’ll take you 20 seconds to try out for yourself.

➜ It’s called, amusingly, Ithy​. (Try saying that 10 times fast!) And all it does, in a nutshell, is bring together the “deep research” tools from a slew of different AI engines—including ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini along with Perplexity, Meta AI, and more—into a single streamlined prompt. That means you can use ’em all together to create a single super-report on any subject imaginable.