FutureSearch

FutureSearch, Nikos I. Bosse, Jon Evans et al.

Amongst the most common use cases of modern AI is LLM chat with web search enabled. However, no direct evaluations of the quality of web research agents exist that control for the continually-changing web. We introduce Deep Research Bench, consisting of 89 multi-step web research task instances of varying difficulty across 8 diverse task categories, with the answers carefully worked out by skilled humans. We provide a "RetroSearch" environment with a large frozen set of scraped web pages, and demonstrate that offline "RetroSearch" agents perform comparably to "live web" agents, enabling reliable evaluations of models over time. We provide robust agent tooling and scaffolding to benchmark major LLMs as they are released, including "thinking" models like o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro. We include automated evaluations of the lengthy agent traces to report progress over time in hallucinations, tool use, and forgetting. Finally, we evaluate the major web research products branded as "Deep Research", "Deep Search", "Search", or "Research." Results are available on a public leaderboard at https://drb.futuresearch.ai/.

FutureSearch, Jack Wildman, Nikos I. Bosse et al.

Forecasting is a challenging task that offers a clearly measurable way to study AI systems. Forecasting requires a large amount of research on the internet, and evaluations require time for events to happen, making the development of forecasting benchmarks challenging. To date, no forecasting benchmark provides a realistic, hermetic, and repeatable environment for LLM forecasters. We introduce Bench To the Future (BTF), a "pastcasting" benchmark with hundreds of high-quality questions for which the resolution is already known. Each question is accompanied by a large offline corpus of tens of thousands of relevant web pages, enabling a way to elicit realistic "forecasts" on past events from LLMs. Results suggest that our pastcasting environment can produce results comparable to those based on forecasts using the internet on at-the-time unresolved questions. We show results benchmarking agent and chain-of-thought forecasting approaches using several LLMs, including the recently-released Claude 4 models, and demonstrate BTF's ability to track steady forecasting capability progress over time. We intend this to be a living benchmark, with new questions added continually to account for increasing training data cutoff dates. We invite researchers to contact us at hello@futuresearch.ai to utilize our benchmark or tooling for their own research.