Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, pushes that analogy himself. “I believe 2026 might be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering,” he said at a press briefing yesterday. “We’re beginning to see that very same type of inflection.”
OpenAI claims that around 1.3 million scientists all over the world submit greater than 8 million queries every week to ChatGPT on advanced topics in science and math. “That tells us that AI is moving from curiosity to core workflow for scientists,” Weil said.
Prism is a response to that user behavior. It could even be seen as a bid to lock in additional scientists to OpenAI’s products in a marketplace filled with rival chatbots.
“I mostly use GPT-5 for writing code,” says Roland Dunbrack, a professor of biology on the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, who shouldn’t be connected to OpenAI. “Occasionally, I ask LLMs a scientific query, mainly hoping it could find information within the literature faster than I can. It used to hallucinate references but doesn’t seem to do this very much anymore.”
Nikita Zhivotovskiy, a statistician on the University of California, Berkeley, says GPT-5 has already turn out to be a crucial tool in his work. “It sometimes helps polish the text of papers, catching mathematical typos or bugs, and provides generally useful feedback,” he says. “It is amazingly helpful for quick summarization of research articles, making interaction with the scientific literature smoother.”
By combining a chatbot with an on a regular basis piece of software, Prism follows a trend set by products similar to OpenAI’s Atlas, which embeds ChatGPT in an internet browser, in addition to LLM-powered office tools from firms similar to Microsoft and Google DeepMind.
Prism incorporates GPT-5.2, the corporate’s best model yet for mathematical and scientific problem-solving, into an editor for writing documents in LaTeX, a standard coding language that scientists use for formatting scientific papers.
A ChatGPT chat box sits at the underside of the screen, below a view of the article being written. Scientists can call on ChatGPT for anything they need. It could help them draft the text, summarize related articles, manage their citations, turn photos of whiteboard scribbles into equations or diagrams, or talk through hypotheses or mathematical proofs.
