TL;DR:
If you’re getting constant timeouts or server errors with o3-deep-research, the issue might be the web_search tool. I switched to web_search_preview and everything started working perfectly again.
I’ve been playing around with the o3-deep-research model for about a month now. Started off with the cookbook examples using the Python SDK. Everything was good at first.
Then I moved things over to the Agents SDK to do some deeper stuff, and that’s when things went sideways. Tons of timeouts, random server errors, and nothing I did seemed to fix it. I even tried tweaking httpx timeouts (set them super high, then removed them completely)… still no luck.
When Agent Builder dropped, I figured that might solve it. Same deal: the agent using o3-deep-research would just crash with a server error after about 30 minutes.
After way too much trial and error, I finally realized the actual problem wasn’t the model at all, but it was the web_search tool. Swapped it out for the older web_search_preview version and, like magic, no more timeouts or crashes.
Posting this so nobody else wastes as much time as I did.
If your o3-deep-research setup keeps dying mid-run, try using web_search_preview instead of web_search. It fixed everything for me.