OpenAI Prism launches as free AI workspace to accelerate scientific research with GPT-5.2

OpenAI launches Prism, a new AI workspace for scientists

OpenAI launched on Tuesday a new scientific workspace program called Prism that is available for free to anyone with a ChatGPT account. Designed as an AI-enhanced word processor and research tool for scientific papers, Prism is deeply integrated with GPT-5.2, which can be used to assess claims, revise prose, or search for prior research. Prism isn't designed to conduct research on its own and without human guidance. Executives believe it will accelerate the work being done by human scientists and compared Prism to coding interfaces like Cursor and Windsurf. "I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI and software engineering," Kevin Weill, VP of OpenAI for Science, said in a press call announcing the tool. The new software comes as OpenAI is seeing a flood of scientific queries coming to its consumer products like ChatGPT. The company says that ChatGPT receives an average of 8.4 million messages a week on advanced topics in the hard sciences -- although it's difficult to know how many are from professional researchers. AI-assisted research is also becoming more common among academic researchers. In mathematics, AI models have been used to prove a number of the long-standing Erdos problems through a combination of literature review and new applications of existing techniques. While the significance of the proofs is still hotly debated, the results have been an early victory for proponents of AI models and formal verification systems. A statistics paper published in December used GPT 5.2 Pro to establish new proofs for a central axiom of statistical theory, with human researchers only prompting and verifying the model's work. OpenAI applauded the result in a blog post, presenting it as a model for human-AI collaboration in research going forward. "In domains with axiomatic theoretical foundations," the post reads,"frontier models can help explore proofs, test hypotheses, and identify connections that might otherwise take substantial human effort to uncover." Much of the value of OpenAI's new system comes from simple product work on existing standards. Prism integrates with LaTeX, an open-source system used to format and typeset scientific papers, but goes significantly beyond most available LaTeX software tools. The program also leverages GPT 5.2's visual capabilities to allow researchers to assemble diagrams from online whiteboard drawings, which can be a significant pain point with existing tools. Perhaps the most powerful feature comes from combining the usual powers of an AI model with more rigorous context management. When users open up a ChatGPT window through Prism, the model can access the full context of the research project, making responses both more germane and more intelligent. Much of that would be possible for a savvy user of GPT-5.2, but OpenAI is hoping that a cleaner interface will draw in scientific researchers more quickly. Weill described it as the same combination of factors that made AI tools so powerful in software engineering. "Software engineering accelerated in part because of amazing models," he told reporters, "and in part because of deep workflow integration."

OpenAI's latest product lets you vibe code science

Prism is a ChatGPT-powered text editor that automates much of the work involved in writing scientific papers. OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science, has been up to. The firm has released a free LLM-powered tool for scientists called Prism, which embeds ChatGPT in a text editor for writing scientific papers. The idea is to put ChatGPT front and center inside software that scientists use to write up their work in much the same way that chatbots are now embedded into popular programming editors. It's vibe coding, but for science. Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, pushes 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 inflection." OpenAI claims that around 1.3 million scientists around the world submit more than 8 million queries a 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 can also be seen as a bid to lock in more scientists to OpenAI's products in a marketplace full of rival chatbots. "I mostly use GPT-5 for writing code," says Roland Dunbrack, a professor of biology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, who is not connected to OpenAI. "Occasionally, I ask LLMs a scientific question, basically hoping it can find information in the literature faster than I can. It used to hallucinate references but does not seem to do that very much anymore." Nikita Zhivotovskiy, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, says GPT-5 has already become an important 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 extremely helpful for quick summarization of research articles, making interaction with the scientific literature smoother." By combining a chatbot with an everyday piece of software, Prism follows a trend set by products such as OpenAI's Atlas, which embeds ChatGPT in a web browser, as well as LLM-powered office tools from firms such as Microsoft and Google DeepMind. Prism incorporates GPT-5.2, the company's best model yet for mathematical and scientific problem-solving, into an editor for writing documents in LaTeX, a common coding language that scientists use for formatting scientific papers. A ChatGPT chat box sits at the bottom of the screen, below a view of the article being written. Scientists can call on ChatGPT for anything they want. It can 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. It's clear that Prism could be a huge time saver. It's also clear that a lot of people may be disappointed, especially after weeks of high-profile social media chatter from researchers at the firm about how good GPT-5 is at solving math problems. Science is drowning in AI slop: Won't this just make it worse? Where is OpenAI's fully automated AI scientist? And when will GPT-5 make a stunning new discovery? That's not the mission, says Weil. He would love to see GPT-5 make a discovery. But he doesn't think that's what will have the biggest impact on science, at least not in the near term. "I think more powerfully -- and with 100% probability -- there's going to be 10,000 advances in science that maybe wouldn't have happened or wouldn't have happened as quickly, and AI will have been a contributor to that," Weil told MIT Technology Review in an exclusive interview this week. "It won't be this shining beacon -- it will just be an incremental, compounding acceleration."

Meet Prism, OpenAI's free research workspace for scientists - how to try it

Powered by GPT-5.2, Prism helps you draft papers, source contextualized references, and more - just don't delegate your research to it. Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways * Prism is a free, collaborative AI workspace for research. * It's meant to support, not replace, human-led science. * AI-enabled workspaces aim to unite disparate tools. This fall, OpenAI deepened its investment in AI for science as the technology's next frontier, citing advancements in GPT-5 as proof of its viability as a research tool -- and eventual scientific automation system. As a first step to that end, OpenAI has launched Prism, a new collaborative workspace for scientists. "In 2025, AI changed software development forever," OpenAI said in the announcement. "In 2026, we expect a comparable shift in science." Also: Inside Google's vision to make Gmail your personal AI agent command center Prism is powered by GPT-5.2, the company's newest model, which was released last month. At the time, OpenAI said GPT-5.2 performs "at or above human expert level," but the company doesn't advise you to let it automate your research -- here's why. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, ZDNET's parent company, filed an April 2025 lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.) How Prism works OpenAI has invested heavily in demonstrating scientific use cases for its models, releasing papers on its prowess in mathematical discovery, cell analysis, and biology experiments. But the tools scientists currently use, OpenAI argued in the announcement, constrain "how research is done day to day." Enter Prism. Geared toward science writing and report compilation, which requires collaboration amongst several participants, Prism "brings drafting, revision, collaboration, and preparation for publication into a single, cloud-based, LaTeX-native workspace," OpenAI said, referring to the LaTeX scientific typesetting standard. Also: 10 ways AI can inflict unprecedented damage in 2026 Prism puts GPT-5.2 inside a scientific project, ideally for a more seamless experience. According to OpenAI, it's based on Crixet, a platform the company purchased and folded into this new release. In a demo, OpenAI developers walked through Prism's interface: a chat window on the left and an in-process research paper on the right. Prism lets scientists access multiple chat agents simultaneously, each executing different commands. These can include adding sources from arXiv and other platforms, creating lecture notes based on a topic, complete with citations, or perfecting equations and figures. Users can also test hypotheses with GPT-5.2 Thinking as a copilot, LaTeX-format diagrams, and edit several documents within one project. Similarly to Claude's just-released Slack, Asana, and Figma integrations and comparable features in ChatGPT, the goal of Prism and tools like it is to centralize systems for ease of use. "Much of the everyday work of research -- drafting papers, revising arguments, managing equations and citations, and coordinating with collaborators -- remains fragmented," OpenAI said. "Researchers often move between editors, PDFs, LaTeX compilers, reference managers, and separate chat interfaces, losing context and interrupting focus." Also: OpenAI says it's working toward catastrophe or utopia - just not sure which OpenAI said reasoning models are less likely to hallucinate citations -- a primary issue in using AI for research, law, and other academic contexts -- because their extended thinking process forces them to review material more closely. Whether that can be verified across the board or not, uploading unpublished or in-progress information, especially study findings, to a chatbot sparks privacy and security concerns. OpenAI clarified that, because users access Prism via their personal ChatGPT account, all privacy-protecting measures already in place in ChatGPT would also apply to content shared in Prism. In an October livestream, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman mentioned that the company aims to launch a "research intern"-level tool by September, and automated AI research by March 2028. In a statement to ZDNET, OpenAI confirmed that Prism "isn't the intern-level system itself, but it's part of how we make scientific work more effective as models and capabilities continue to advance." Limitations Tools like Prism aren't meant to automate research, however. In a November 2025 paper, OpenAI hedged that while GPT-5 can "expand the surface area of exploration" and quicken an expert's workflow, it shouldn't be left to run projects or solve problems on its own. In the demo, developers referred to Prism as a "powertool" for scientists, not a replacement. Also: I put GPT-5.2 through a 14-round test, and the AI model raised some serious questions More broadly, companies are shipping AI models at much faster rates to keep up with industry competition and user demand. It's unclear how this impacts highly specific, fact-heavy use cases like science, even with GPT-5's benchmark performance, which rivals that of competing frontier models. Beyond that, public trust in science itself is in a shaky place. But OpenAI doesn't think AI has to worsen that. "As AI becomes more capable, there are real concerns about volume, quality, and trust in the scientific record," an OpenAI representative told ZDNET. "Our view is that the right response isn't to keep AI at arm's length, or to let it operate invisibly in the background -- it's to integrate it directly into scientific workflows in ways that preserve accountability and keep researchers firmly in control." The AI workspace future At their best, AI tools can be frictionless portals to the many platforms you need for work (and sometimes play). The industry's sights are now set on turning what have been simply chatbots into full-fledged, assistant-equipped workspaces -- even your inbox. These will rival what we've come to expect from traditional software by offering a single, convenient entry point and executing commands in natural language. How to access Anyone with a personal ChatGPT account can access Prism starting today. Because "Prism is designed to expand access," OpenAI said, the tool is subscription-free; users can create unlimited projects and add unlimited seats to account for the inherently collaborative nature of scientific research. That said, OpenAI said the new workspace will be available to ChatGPT Business, Team, Enterprise, and Education users soon, and that "more powerful AI features" will be coming to paid ChatGPT users soon.

OpenAI releases Prism, a Claude Code-like app for scientific research

OpenAI is releasing a new app called Prism today, and it hopes it does for science what coding agents like Claude Code and its own Codex platform have done for programming. Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research. That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals -- in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography. "None of this absolves the scientist of the responsibility to verify that their references are correct, but it can certainly speed up the process," said Kevin Weil, vice president of science for OpenAI, when asked during the demo the possibility of ChatGPT generating fake citations. "We're conscious that, as AI becomes more capable, there are concerns around volume, quality and trust in the scientific community," he later added. "Our view is that the right response is not to keep AI at arm's length or let it operate invisibly in the background; it's to integrate it directly into scientific workflows in ways that preserve accountability and keep researchers in control." Later in the same demo, the OpenAI employee used Prism to generate a lesson plan for a graduate course on general relativity, as well as a set of problems for students to solve. OpenAI envisions these features helping scientists and professors spend less time on the more tedious tasks in their professions. Prism is available to anyone with a personal ChatGPT account. It includes support for unlimited projects and collaborators. OpenAI plans to bring the software to organizations on ChatGPT Business, Team, Enterprise and Education plans soon. Crixet won't be offered separately.

OpenAI's New Product Helps You Do 'Vibe Physics' Like Travis Kalanick

OpenAI would like scientists to work through their latest research paper with ChatGPT as their co-author. On Tuesday, the company introduced Prism, which it calls an "AI-native workspace for scientists to write and collaborate on research." The idea behind Prism, per OpenAI, is to give researchers a unified platform to work from while conducting research -- an attempt to fix the fragmentation that currently occurs when scientists have to jump between different programs to open and edit PDFs, LaTeX compilers, reference managers, and chat services. (Of course, all of these tools are usually very good at their dedicated task rather than trying to be a solution to everything, which is why experts choose to use them.) Prism, the company said, is built on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform that OpenAI acquired. It is powered by GPT-5.2 Thinking, which is the company's most advanced model designed for handling extended tasks and reasoning. OpenAI said researchers should be able to draft and revise papers directly in Prism, search for relevant literature and context to cite, and use AI to "create, refactor, and reason over equations, citations, and figures." It'll also allow multiple users to make revisions and leave comments in real-time. That all sounds lovely in theory, but it may not be all roses and scientific breakthroughs in practice. Since generative AI tools like ChatGPT have become available to the public, scientific journals have been flooded with papers of dubious quality thanks to researchers farming out parts of the work to AI. An eye-catching example of this happened when the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology published a paper that included an AI-generated image of a rat with an extremely large penis and too many testicles. Scientific publishing was already facing a crunch of too many papers and not enough time for thorough review, and that has only gotten worse with the availability of AI to handle the boring stuff -- whether it actually does it correctly being an entirely different matter. A recent study published by researchers at UC Berkeley Haas and Cornell University found that the output of scientists using generative AI to aid in research increases by as much as 50%, but the work they are publishing is of "marginal scientific merit." It also found that humans are still producing better research on their own: papers written by people improved the more complex the writing got, while papers written by LLMs got worse when the complexity increased. Meanwhile, normies are able to tap into these tools and trick themselves into thinking they're breaking new ground. Last year, Uber founder Travis Kalanick bragged that he was taking conversations with AI models to "the edge of what's known in quantum physics, and then I'm doing the equivalent of vibe coding, except it's vibe physics." Kalanick isn't actually discovering anything, and he wouldn't even know how to know if he was, but he can convince himself that he is with the right tools. For researchers who do choose to vibe out their research in Prism, they're probably wondering how OpenAI will handle their data. After all, it's free, so the company must be getting something out of it somehow. Per OpenAI's FAQs, "Prism does not currently use the 'Zero Data Retention' (ZDR) API option and maintains logs for a period after requests to improve the product." However, the company claims that Prism "does not train on API-provided data by default for many API customers." The company claims that a mode where no text is stored or human-reviewed is on their roadmap, but there is no timeline available at the moment. The workspace is available for free with unlimited projects and collaborators to anyone with a ChatGPT personal account. It'll roll out "soon" to organizations using ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Education plans, and "more powerful AI features will be made available through paid ChatGPT plans over time."

OpenAI Launches Free AI-Native Workspace for Science Writing and Collaboration | PYMNTS.com

Dubbed "Prism" and launched Tuesday (Jan. 27), the workspace is powered by GPT-2, offers unlimited projects and collaborators, and is available to anyone with a ChatGPT personal account, OpenAI said in a Tuesday blog post. Prism is designed to address the fragmentation currently seen in the everyday work of research, according to the post. Researchers use disconnected tools to do things such as drafting papers, revising arguments, managing equations and citations, and coordinating with collaborators, the post said. The workspace solves this by using the document preparation system LaTeX, per the post. Specifically, it builds on the cloud-based LaTeX platform Crixet, which OpenAI acquired. "[Prism] brings drafting, revision, collaboration and preparation for publication into a single, cloud-based, LaTeX-native workspace," OpenAI said in the post. "Rather than operating as a separate tool alongside the writing process, GPT-5.2 works within the project itself -- with access to the structure of the paper, equations, references and surrounding context." While Prism is free to use and available to anyone with a ChatGPT account, OpenAI plans to make more powerful AI features available through paid ChatGPT plans in the future, per the post. "In 2025, AI changed software development forever," OpenAI said in the post. "In 2026, we expect a comparable shift in science, as AI begins to meaningfully accelerate discovery in several ways, one of which is reducing friction in day-to-day research work." In another, separate initiative, it was reported Wednesday (Jan. 21) that OpenAI is working to expand the reach of its products in countries without widespread AI access. The firm's "OpenAI For Countries" initiative aims to push governments to construct more data centers and lobby for greater AI use in fields like health, education and disaster preparedness. On the same day, it was reported that OpenAI is looking to increase its market share among enterprise clients. OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar said that she expects the share of OpenAI's business that is made up of enterprise customers to increase from the current 40% to 50% by the end of the year.