I took this as a joking reference to Hal in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey where an AI-driven computer becomes sentient and takes a "mind" of its own...

Joking aside, I also see what deep research is doing is extremely far from anything in this realm. Instead, the key innovations I see are:

1) The "research" part here is the ability to combine an AI model with a web search adding information. This helps rather than only working with what was in the training data. It has been computationally enabled by models having larger and larger "context" as input.

2) The "reasoning model" builds on a technique known as "reinforcement learning" where a model operates with a goal and a set of "rewards" to guide the behavior to the goal. More recently these reasoning models have been listing the steps being taken as "reasoning". I see this more as either a debugging tool and then giving people something they might hang onto if they explain the result.

I'm still cautious on ascribing too much to these AI agents, but what I find intriguing with these "deep research" approaches is particularly the ability to combine an expanded web search to pick up new data and then summarizing well from that data found. So I think it is still mostly a tool for this domain for an area you aren't as knowledgeable and haven't done recent web searches in this area. That is all very far away from Hal... Instead I think of it as an improvement of what you would do now with "search"