Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, pushes that analogy himself. “I feel 2026 will likely be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI in software program engineering,” he mentioned at a press briefing yesterday. “We’re beginning to see that very same form of inflection.”
OpenAI claims that round 1.3 million scientists all over the world submit greater than 8 million queries per week to ChatGPT on superior matters in science and math. “That tells us that AI is transferring from curiosity to core workflow for scientists,” Weil mentioned.
Prism is a response to that person habits. It may also be seen as a bid to lock in additional scientists to OpenAI’s merchandise in a market filled with rival chatbots.
“I largely use GPT-5 for writing code,” says Roland Dunbrack, a professor of biology on the Fox Chase Most cancers Heart in Philadelphia, who will not be related to OpenAI. “Sometimes, I ask LLMs a scientific query, mainly hoping it might probably discover data within the literature sooner than I can. It used to hallucinate references however doesn’t appear to do this very a lot anymore.”
Nikita Zhivotovskiy, a statistician on the College of California, Berkeley, says GPT-5 has already turn into an vital device in his work. “It typically helps polish the textual content of papers, catching mathematical typos or bugs, and supplies typically helpful suggestions,” he says. “This can be very useful for fast summarization of analysis articles, making interplay with the scientific literature smoother.”
By combining a chatbot with an on a regular basis piece of software program, Prism follows a development set by merchandise akin to OpenAI’s Atlas, which embeds ChatGPT in an internet browser, in addition to LLM-powered workplace instruments from corporations akin to Microsoft and Google DeepMind.
Prism incorporates GPT-5.2, the corporate’s finest mannequin but for mathematical and scientific problem-solving, into an editor for writing paperwork in LaTeX, a standard coding language that scientists use for formatting scientific papers.
A ChatGPT chat field sits on the backside of the display screen, beneath a view of the article being written. Scientists can name on ChatGPT for something they need. It could actually assist them draft the textual content, summarize associated articles, handle their citations, flip photographs of whiteboard scribbles into equations or diagrams, or speak by way of hypotheses or mathematical proofs.
