You are a bit behind. All the "deep research" tools, and paid AI search tools in general, combine LLMs with search. When I do research on you.com it routinely searches a 100 sites. Even Google searches get Gemini'd now. I had to chuckle because your very link provides a demonstration.

But the whole point of these “deep research” models is to.. you know.. do research.

LLMs by themselves have not been good at this, but the whole point is to find a way to make them good.

If you know more than others, it would be great to share some of what you know, so the rest of us can learn. Comments that only declare how much you know, without sharing any of it, are less useful, and ultimately off-topic.

https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...

OpenAI and Gemini literally produce the correct results.

It seems like you don't understand or haven't tried their deep research tools.

Perplexity markets itself as a search tool. So even if LLMs are not search engines, Perplexity definitely is trying to be one.