AI developer Hugging Face says it’s created an open-source AI research agent that can trade blows with OpenAI’s latest Deep Research feature — in just 24 hours.

The Sam Altman-led company released the agent, which “uses reasoning to synthesize large amounts of online information and complete multi-step research tasks for you,” over the weekend.

Simply put, Deep Research — the company technically doesn’t capitalize the name, but we’re just going to go ahead and do so because it looks bizarre not to — sits on top of an existing AI model to provide new functionality to the user. In practice, you can ask it to do things like generate a “competitive analysis on streaming platforms or a personalized report on the best commuter bike,” according to OpenAI, which could take “anywhere from five to 30 minutes.”

But it didn’t take long for Hugging Face researchers to come up with a worthy alternative.

“While powerful LLMs are now freely available in open-source, OpenAI didn’t disclose much about the agentic framework underlying Deep Research,” Hugging Face wrote in a Tuesday announcement. “So we decided to embark on a 24-hour mission to reproduce their results and open-source the needed framework along the way!”

The company created an “agent” framework” that writes actions in code instead, which it says immediately led to a major bump in performance.

It’s not perfect quite yet, it’s worth pointing out. Hugging Face’s Open Deep Research scored a 55.15 percent accuracy on a benchmark called General AI Assistants, while OpenAI’s version scored 67.36, leaving some room for improvement.