Even if you don’t choose to use AI, you’re probably interacting with it

Many AI systems now produce fully documented reports with citations, making the apparatus of scholarship available without the slow friction through which scholarship is ordinarily built. From the university to the lab, the repercussions are quickly being felt. As researchers benefit from these shortcuts at scale, what is being lost?

OpenAI’s Deep Research spends five to 30 minutes searching the internet, filing results into a structured synthesis, and delivering a report complete with footnotes. Google’s equivalent may use 80 search queries for a typical task, running asynchronously in the background while the user attends to something else. Anthropic describes a multi-agent architecture in which a lead agent spawns parallel subagents to explore separate branches of a question; this setup outperformed a single-agent arrangement by 90.2% on