Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, extends that analogy himself. “I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering,” he said at a press briefing yesterday. “We’re starting to see that same kind of change.”
OpenAI claims that approximately 1.3 million scientists from around the world submit more than 8 million questions per week to ChatGPT on advanced topics in science and mathematics. “This tells us that AI is moving from a curiosity to a mainstream workflow for scientists,” Weil said.
Prism is a response to that user’s behavior. It could also be seen as a bid to get more scientists involved in OpenAI’s products in a market flooded with rival chatbots.
“I mostly use GPT-5 to write code that’s not connected to OpenAI,” says Roland Dunbrack, a biology professor at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia. “Sometimes, I ask the LLM a scientific question, basically hoping it can find information in the literature faster than I can. It used to hallucinate references but doesn’t seem to do that anymore.”
Statistician Nikita Zhivotovsky at the University of California, Berkeley says that GPT-5 has already become an important tool in his work. “This sometimes helps to improve the text of papers, catch mathematical typos or bugs, and generally provide useful feedback,” he says. “This is extremely useful for quick summaries of research articles, making it easier to interact with the scientific literature.”
By integrating chatbots with everyday software, Prism follows the trend set by products like OpenAI’s Atlas, which embeds Chatbot into a web browser, as well as LLM-powered office tools from firms like Microsoft and Google’s DeepMind.
Prism incorporates GPT-5.2, the company’s best model to date for mathematical and scientific problem-solving, into an editor for writing documents in LaTeX, a common coding language that scientists use to format scientific papers.
A ChatGPT chat box is located at the bottom of the screen, below the view of the article being written. Scientists can call ChatGPT for anything they need. It can help them draft text, summarize related articles, manage their citations, convert photos of whiteboard scribbles into equations or diagrams, or talk through hypotheses or mathematical proofs.
