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."

'We're still early, but it's clear that AI will play a meaningful role in how science advances': OpenAI launches free Prism app for scientific research

* Prism combines Crixet's LaTeX document preparation with GPT-5.2 * OpenAI says existing tools are highly fragmented, which causes friction * The app is free to use for personal plans - other plans and paid features coming soon OpenAI has launched Prism, a new app it says will do for science what coding agents did for programming, and it's all about putting together scientific research with citations and figures. Prism is built on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform that OpenAI is also acquiring as part of the announcement. The AI comes from the latest GPT-5.2 and GPT-5.2 Thinking models, which are suited to mathematical and scientific reasoning. OpenAI criticized the existing scientific research flow for being highly fragmented, causing developers to have to juggle multiple tools. "We're still early, but it's clear that AI will play a meaningful role in how science advances," the company wrote. OpenAI Prism launch The ChatGPT-maker explained Prism will replace having to use multiple apps, such as PDF editors, reference managers and chat apps, which will ultimately boost productivity by putting all the context in one place. Some of the use cases OpenAI detailed include drafting and revising papers, searching for and incorporating relevant literature, automatically building bibliographies, converting handwritten equations and diagrams directly into LaTeX and collaborating in real time with co-authors and students. "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," the post reads, likening the impending scientific revolution to the coding revolution we've already seen. Best still, Prism is set to be free to all users will a personal ChatGPT account, with OpenAI targeting making scientific research more accessible. It'll also support unlimited projects and collaborators. Although Education plans aren't yet getting access to Prism, the company promises to add these plans as well as Business, Team and Enterprise subscriptions at a later date. However, although it's free, as the product progresses, OpenAI expects to add more advanced features to paid plans. Follow TechRadar on Google News and add us as a preferred source to get our expert news, reviews, and opinion in your feeds. Make sure to click the Follow button! And of course you can also follow TechRadar on TikTok for news, reviews, unboxings in video form, and get regular updates from us on WhatsApp too.

OpenAI Rolls Out Free Science Platform Prism as Experts Warn of Privacy Concerns - Decrypt

Experts warn of privacy, hallucination, and intellectual property concerns. OpenAI is expanding into the scientific pipeline with Prism, a new workspace launched on Tuesday in a sign of the company's clearest bid yet to make its models part of high-value research. The tool is a web-based application that integrates ChatGPT (5.2) directly into scientific writing, enabling in-place drafting, revision, and collaboration, according to a statement on Tuesday. "Over the past year, we've begun to see AI accelerate scientific work across domains," OpenAI wrote. "Advanced reasoning systems like GPT‑5 are helping push the frontiers⁠ of mathematics, accelerating the analysis⁠ of human immune-cell experiments, and speeding up experimental iteration⁠ in molecular biology." In a town hall on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is already hearing meaningful feedback from scientists about "nontrivial" research progress using its latest model. "With 5.2, a special version we use internally, we're now for the first time hearing from scientists that the scientific progress of these models is no longer super trivial," Altman said. "I can't believe that a model that can come up with new scientific insights is not also capable, with a different harness and trained a little bit differently, of coming up with new insights about products to build." Prism is based on Crixet, a San Francisco-based "LaTeX platform" that OpenAI acquired earlier this month. A LaTeX platform is a specialized writing environment that lets researchers write, format, and typeset scientific papers using code-based commands, making it easier to handle complex equations, citations, and technical layouts consistently. Privacy, Ownership, and the Limits of AI For Jonathan Schaeffer, a distinguished university professor emeritus of artificial intelligence at the University of Alberta and co-founder of AI developer Synsira, there are both promising and concerning factors in the use of AI in research. "There are two issues with writing papers," Schaeffer told Decrypt in an interview. "One of which is composing the text, and the other is doing the research or making the inferences or the insights that you're going to add to your paper." He said Prism appears to excel at the former in that it helps researchers with writing, proofreading, and citations, which he said is great for literature search as opposed to actually aiding in the research process, which he called "a completely different can of worms." In August, research published in Science found that 22% of computer science papers showed signs of artificial intelligence as researchers increasingly turned to the technology. More troubling, Schaeffer noted, are the intellectual property implications, saying that "the devil is in the details." "Standard protocol is, if I'm writing a paper, all I am doing is documenting my scientific research, and it's my intellectual property, and I own it," Schaeffer said. "Now, if you're going to use ChatGPT to write these papers, then you're actually exposing your intellectual property to a multinational company," he said, noting additional privacy concerns or whether OpenAI would have any legal right to claim researchers' intellectual property. When questioned about the continued issue of AI hallucinations, Schaeffer predicted that "hallucinations will not go away. It will never get down to zero." He advocates thinking of AI as "augmented intelligence" rather than artificial intelligence, calling AI models "impressive but fallible." "Think of Prism or any of these large language models for research or writing or whatever you're doing as being your graduate student or intern," he said. "They can be used to suggest things to you, perhaps a paragraph of text, or perhaps they're going to spout out a conclusion. They're going to suggest things to you, but it's your paper. You have to take responsibility." Despite the continued risk of hallucinations, the Prism launch coincides with a strategic pivot by OpenAI's leadership and a focus on "outcome-based pricing." Last week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar published a blog post outlining an evolving business model for AI developers beyond subscriptions and API fees. In the post, Friar wrote that as AI moves into "scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge." "Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created," Friar wrote. "That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path." While Prism is currently free for personal users, the company's recent focus on fields like drug discovery suggests a long-term strategy of sharing in the economic value created by the breakthroughs researchers achieve using its tools. During the town hall, Altman cautioned that, despite recent advances, today's models still fall short of operating independently in scientific research. "I think it's still a long or reasonably long way away from the models doing truly completely closed loop autonomous research in most areas," Altman said.

OpenAI Rolls Out Free Science Platform Prism as Experts Warn of Privacy Concerns

Experts warn of privacy, hallucination, and intellectual property concerns. OpenAI is expanding into the scientific pipeline with Prism, a new workspace launched on Tuesday in a sign of the company's clearest bid yet to make its models part of high-value research. The tool is a web-based application that integrates ChatGPT (5.2) directly into scientific writing, enabling in-place drafting, revision, and collaboration, according to a statement on Tuesday. "Over the past year, we've begun to see AI accelerate scientific work across domains," OpenAI wrote. "Advanced reasoning systems like GPT‑5 are helping push the frontiers⁠ of mathematics, accelerating the analysis⁠ of human immune-cell experiments, and speeding up experimental iteration⁠ in molecular biology." In a town hall on Tuesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said the company is already hearing meaningful feedback from scientists about "nontrivial" research progress using its latest model. "With 5.2, a special version we use internally, we're now for the first time hearing from scientists that the scientific progress of these models is no longer super trivial," Altman said. "I can't believe that a model that can come up with new scientific insights is not also capable, with a different harness and trained a little bit differently, of coming up with new insights about products to build." Prism is based on Crixet, a San Francisco-based "LaTeX platform" that OpenAI acquired earlier this month. A LaTeX platform is a specialized writing environment that lets researchers write, format, and typeset scientific papers using code-based commands, making it easier to handle complex equations, citations, and technical layouts consistently. Privacy, Ownership, and the Limits of AI For Jonathan Schaeffer, a distinguished university professor emeritus of artificial intelligence at the University of Alberta and co-founder of AI developer Synsira, there are both promising and concerning factors in the use of AI in research. "There are two issues with writing papers," Schaeffer told Decrypt in an interview. "One of which is composing the text, and the other is doing the research or making the inferences or the insights that you're going to add to your paper." He said Prism appears to excel at the former in that it helps researchers with writing, proofreading, and citations, which he said is great for literature search as opposed to actually aiding in the research process, which he called "a completely different can of worms." In August, research published in Science found that 22% of computer science papers showed signs of artificial intelligence as researchers increasingly turned to the technology. More troubling, Schaeffer noted, are the intellectual property implications, saying that "the devil is in the details." "Standard protocol is, if I'm writing a paper, all I am doing is documenting my scientific research, and it's my intellectual property, and I own it," Schaeffer said. "Now, if you're going to use ChatGPT to write these papers, then you're actually exposing your intellectual property to a multinational company," he said, noting additional privacy concerns or whether OpenAI would have any legal right to claim researchers' intellectual property. When questioned about the continued issue of AI hallucinations, Schaeffer predicted that "hallucinations will not go away. It will never get down to zero." He advocates thinking of AI as "augmented intelligence" rather than artificial intelligence, calling AI models "impressive but fallible." "Think of Prism or any of these large language models for research or writing or whatever you're doing as being your graduate student or intern," he said. "They can be used to suggest things to you, perhaps a paragraph of text, or perhaps they're going to spout out a conclusion. They're going to suggest things to you, but it's your paper. You have to take responsibility." Despite the continued risk of hallucinations, the Prism launch coincides with a strategic pivot by OpenAI's leadership and a focus on "outcome-based pricing." Last week, OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar published a blog post outlining an evolving business model for AI developers beyond subscriptions and API fees. In the post, Friar wrote that as AI moves into "scientific research, drug discovery, energy systems, and financial modeling, new economic models will emerge." "Licensing, IP-based agreements, and outcome-based pricing will share in the value created," Friar wrote. "That is how the internet evolved. Intelligence will follow the same path." While Prism is currently free for personal users, the company's recent focus on fields like drug discovery suggests a long-term strategy of sharing in the economic value created by the breakthroughs researchers achieve using its tools. During the town hall, Altman cautioned that, despite recent advances, today's models still fall short of operating independently in scientific research. "I think it's still a long or reasonably long way away from the models doing truly completely closed loop autonomous research in most areas," Altman said. OpenAI did not immediately respond to Decrypt's request for comment.

Prism arrives as a free AI-native workspace for scientific paper drafting

OpenAI launched Prism, an AI-enhanced scientific workspace, on Tuesday. The free web app, accessible to anyone with a ChatGPT account, serves as a word processor and research tool for scientific papers, integrated with GPT-5.2 to assess claims, revise prose, and search prior research. Prism requires human guidance and does not conduct research autonomously. OpenAI executives state that the tool accelerates work performed by human scientists. They compare Prism to coding interfaces such as Cursor and Windsurf, which assist developers in similar ways. Kevin Weil, OpenAI's VP for Science, spoke during a press call announcing the tool. He said, "I think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI and software engineering." This statement reflects OpenAI's perspective on the evolving role of AI in scientific workflows. The launch coincides with increased scientific activity on OpenAI's consumer products. ChatGPT receives an average of 8.4 million messages per week on advanced topics in the hard sciences. The company notes that determining the exact number from professional researchers proves challenging. AI-assisted research gains prevalence among academic researchers. In mathematics, AI models have proven several long-standing Erdős problems. These proofs combine literature review with new applications of existing techniques. Debates persist regarding the significance of these proofs. Nonetheless, the results mark an early achievement for advocates of AI models and formal verification systems. A statistics paper published in December employed GPT-5.2 Pro to establish new proofs for a central axiom of statistical theory. Human researchers handled prompting and verification of the model's output. This approach limited their role to oversight. OpenAI addressed this statistics paper in a blog post. The company praised the outcome as a model for human-AI collaboration in research. The post states, "In domains with axiomatic theoretical foundations, frontier models can help explore proofs, test hypotheses, and identify connections that might otherwise take substantial human effort to uncover." OpenAI positions this as indicative of collaborative potential in structured fields.

OpenAI Introduces Prism, a Free AI Workspace for Scientific Collaboration

The platform supports unlimited projects and collaborators OpenAI launched Prism on Tuesday, a free, cloud-based workspace designed to support scientific writing, collaboration and research workflows. The platform integrates GPT-5.2, OpenAI's most advanced reasoning model, directly into the process of drafting and editing scientific documents, and combines elements such as LaTeX editing, literature search and real-time collaboration in a single artificial intelligence (AI)-native workspace. Prism is available immediately to anyone with a ChatGPT personal account and will later be extended to Business, Enterprise, and Education users. OpenAI Brings Prism for Scientists and Researchers In a blog post, the San Francisco-based AI giant introduced and detailed Prism. While the web-based platform brings AI intelligence and chatbot-based assistance to researchers, Prism's main offering is scientific research and writing. The company claims that traditionally, these two aspects require switching between multiple tools, such as word processors, PDF readers, LaTeX compilers, reference managers and separate chat interfaces. The risk of working with multiple tools is siloed information and loss of context at each transition, the company added. OpenAI said Prism aims to unify these processes into one environment where drafting, revision, citation management and collaboration happen collaboratively without flipping between separate apps. The company described Prism as a LaTeX-native workspace, meaning it is built to support LaTeX, the typesetting system widely used in scientific documents, directly within the platform. Powering Prism is GPT-5.2, the AI giant's flagship AI model that can understand the structure of a research paper, including equations, figures, citations and surrounding context. Rather than operating as a stand-alone chatbot, Prism's AI works inside the document itself, allowing it to assist with drafting text, revising arguments, formatting equations and resolving references based on the full manuscript context. OpenAI said this integration helps researchers keep ideas and edits aligned with the overall structure of their work. One of the central capabilities of Prism is real-time collaboration. Multiple researchers can work together on a document, with changes, comments and edits synchronised in the cloud. The platform also supports unlimited projects and collaborators. OpenAI stated that Prism is available for free to users with personal ChatGPT accounts, and that the platform will be made available to ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Education plans in the future.

OpenAI Prism: AI Workspace for Scientific Research & Collaboration

OpenAI has introduced Prism, an AI workspace aimed at assisting scientists in handling research papers, datasets, and collaboration all in one platform. Designed for discovery-focused tasks, Prism assists researchers in managing information overload, analyzing intricate data, and collaborating more efficiently within teams. Instead of substituting scientific judgment, the tool is designed as an aid, indicating a wider trend towards domain-specific AI tailored for practical research. Artificial intelligence has transformed the ways individuals write, program, and analyze data, yet its involvement in scientific discovery has been more reserved and constrained. That is starting to shift. OpenAI has introduced Prism, an AI workspace tailored for scientists, indicating a dedicated initiative to integrate AI into the routine tasks of research instead of viewing it as a versatile productivity instrument. Budget 2026 Scientific work differs significantly from numerous other professional activities. It is seldom straightforward, frequently unpredictable, and highly cooperative. Scholars dedicate years to sifting through extensive literature, handling intricate datasets, assessing hypotheses, reevaluating assumptions, and collaborating with teams from various institutions. These tasks are usually scattered among various unconnected tools, resulting in friction that hampers progress. Prism aims to tackle this situation by integrating data, reasoning, and collaboration into one organized setting. As reported by Bloomberg, Prism enables researchers to upload research documents, datasets, and experimental notes, facilitating interaction with them through sophisticated AI reasoning. Rather than merely producing text or responses, the tool aims to assist researchers in examining relationships, contrasting results, and structuring information in a manner that fosters scientific reasoning. This differentiation holds significance. Prism is not designed to generate discoveries independently, but rather to assist in the discovery process. TechCrunch highlights that collaboration is fundamental to the design of Prism. Contemporary research relies more on teams that cross disciplines and locations, and preserving a common context frequently proves to be difficult. Prism serves as a shared environment where researchers can collaborate on each other's projects, monitor advancements, and maintain a connection between analysis and dialogue. The tool seeks to enhance collaboration efficiency by minimizing coordination overhead without altering the fundamental work practices of scientists. In practical terms, Prism tackles three ongoing issues in research: excessive information, complexity, and coordination. The speed of scientific publishing has increased to such an extent that staying current with pertinent literature has become a significant challenge. Prism assists researchers in condensing papers, uncovering relevant links, and querying their own materials more efficiently. This enables scientists to dedicate less time to searching and organizing, and more time to analyzing and questioning. Prism provides a setting for data-heavy research that allows exploration and documentation to occur simultaneously. Researchers can analyze outcomes, evaluate concepts, and document findings without frequently toggling between applications. This closer connection between analysis and reflection aims to accelerate iteration while ensuring human judgment remains firmly in command. OpenAI has stressed that Prism is designed to support scientists rather than substitute them, and that supervision and validation are crucial, especially in areas where mistakes can have significant repercussions. The introduction of Prism signifies a wider change in the ways artificial intelligence is created and utilized. Initial AI implementation emphasized rapidity and mechanization. Prism signifies a shift towards specialized AI, designed for settings where context, depth, and reliability are prioritized over immediate results. Scientific research faces mounting challenges due to restricted funding, expanding datasets, and heightened expectations for its influence. Even small improvements in efficiency can lead to major long-term impacts. From OpenAI's viewpoint, Prism is an initiative aimed at utilizing AI in fields that can yield significant societal advantages. Scientific discoveries are fundamental to progress in healthcare, climate research, materials science, and energy. AI tools such as Prism can enhance researchers' ability to navigate complexity and direct their focus more efficiently, potentially reducing the gap between insight and impact while maintaining the scientific rigor essential for research. The competitive environment is also changing. Startups and established tech firms are competing to develop AI solutions for research institutions and laboratories. What sets Prism apart is its effort to incorporate sophisticated reasoning models directly into a workflow intended for discovery, instead of modifying consumer tools for professional applications. The extent to which scientists embrace it will hinge on trust, usability, and its alignment with current research methods. Significantly, Prism comes at a time when the function of AI in scientific discourse is currently under discussion. Legitimate worries exist regarding dependence, bias, and consistency in results. OpenAI presents Prism as a collaborative environment instead of an independent system, aiming to alleviate these worries by highlighting that AI should augment human cognition, not supplant it. Prism signifies a constructive and realistic advancement in the progression of AI. It does not guarantee immediate breakthroughs or automatic findings. Rather, it provides a more practical and possibly more beneficial approach: a means to assist scientists in thinking more clearly, collaborating more efficiently, and managing increasing complexity. With AI becoming increasingly specialized, tools such as Prism indicate that the future of discovery will be influenced not just by machines, but also by the careful integration of these tools into human-driven research.

OpenAI launches Prism: Here's all you need to know about the free AI workspace for scientific research

OpenAI on Tuesday announced Prism, a free, AI-native workspace designed to transform how scientists write, collaborate, and prepare research for publication, integrating its latest reasoning model, GPT-5.2, directly into the scientific workflow. Prism is available immediately to anyone with a personal ChatGPT account. Support for ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Education plans will roll out soon, the company said. The Sam Altman-led company added that with Prism, it aims to address issues pertaining to drafting papers, handling citations, coordinating collaborators and managing Latex. Latex is a document-preparation and typesetting system used to write scientific and technical documents, especially those with complex equations. ChatGPT Prism: A unified workflow for research Prism combines writing, collaboration, and publishing in a cloud-based Latex workspace, with GPT-5.2 working directly in the document. OpenAI says this approach reduces context switching and interruptions that slow researchers' work. The platform is built on Crixet, a cloud Latex service previously acquired by OpenAI, now reworked into Prism as a unified, AI-integrated product. Prism's features Prism allows researchers to draft and revise papers with AI. It can also help scholars search for relevant literature on the topic. Additionally, Prism can reason through equations, citations and figures across an entire document. Further, it can collaborate with co-authors in real time with optional voice-based editing inside the document. Why it matters OpenAI frames Prism as an early step toward a broader shift in how research is conducted. After AI reshaped software development in 2025, the company expects 2026 to mark a similar inflection point for scientific research, it said in the blog post.

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.

OpenAI launches GPT‑5.2-powered Prism for scientific writing

OpenAI has introduced Prism, a free AI-native workspace for scientific writing and collaboration. Powered by GPT‑5.2, Prism integrates drafting, revision, and teamwork in a single cloud-based, LaTeX-native environment. The platform is designed to address the fragmentation in scientific workflows caused by multiple disconnected tools. What is Prism Prism is a workspace that allows researchers to write and collaborate on scientific documents while using AI to assist throughout the process. It incorporates equations, citations, figures, and document structure directly into projects, with GPT‑5.2 operating within the workflow. Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform acquired by OpenAI, combining a mature writing environment with AI support for research. Why Prism Scientific research often involves moving between PDFs, LaTeX editors, reference managers, and chat tools, which interrupts workflow and reduces efficiency. Prism addresses these challenges by providing a single environment where teams can draft, revise, manage equations, and collaborate in real time, reducing the overhead of switching between tools and maintaining context. Features * GPT‑5.2 Thinking: Explore ideas, test hypotheses, and reason through complex scientific problems using context from the full document. * Document Drafting and Revision: Edit and revise papers with access to surrounding text, citations, equations, and figures. * Literature Integration: Search and incorporate relevant research (e.g., from arXiv) while revising manuscripts. * Equation and Diagram Tools: Refactor, create, or convert whiteboard diagrams directly into LaTeX. * Collaboration: Unlimited co-authors can edit, comment, and revise in real time without version conflicts. * Voice-Based Editing: Make minor edits using voice commands without leaving the workspace. * Cloud-Based Access: No local LaTeX installation or environment setup is required. OpenAI plans to expand Prism's AI capabilities through paid ChatGPT plans. Prism represents an early step in integrating AI into research workflows to reduce friction in day-to-day scientific work and accelerate discovery. Availability Prism is available free for all ChatGPT personal account users. Organizational access will soon be extended to ChatGPT Business, Enterprise, and Education plans. Prism can be accessed at prism.openai.com.

OpenAI's Prism explained: Can you really vibe code science?

For years, artificial intelligence has promised to accelerate scientific discovery. But most AI tools still sit awkwardly on the sidelines, helping with narrow tasks like summarising papers or generating snippets of code. With Prism, OpenAI is testing a more radical idea: what if research itself became conversational? Prism is built around the same philosophy that gave rise to "vibe coding", a loose term used by developers to describe steering software creation through natural language prompts rather than rigid planning. Applied to science, the approach sounds almost heretical. Research is supposed to be methodical, structured, and precise. Prism asks whether parts of that process can instead feel fluid, exploratory, and guided by dialogue. Also read: ChatGPT Prism: What is it, top features, how it works and step-by-step guide to use it From rigid workflows to conversational research Modern scientific work is fragmented by design. A researcher might analyse data in one environment, write code in another, draft a paper in a separate editor, and manage references elsewhere. Prism attempts to collapse those layers into a single AI-first workspace. Instead of switching tools, scientists can describe what they want to do. That might mean asking the system to clean a dataset, generate a plot, explain an unexpected result, or rewrite a dense paragraph for clarity. The AI becomes a collaborator embedded directly in the research flow rather than a detached assistant. Also read: What is Clawdbot (now Moltbot): Viral AI agent's features explained, how to use This is where the idea of "vibe coding" enters. Rather than writing every line of logic upfront, researchers guide the system through intent. They iterate by conversation, adjusting direction based on outputs, much like a back-and-forth with a junior colleague. The goal is not to replace expertise but to reduce friction, especially in early-stage exploration when ideas are still forming. Crucially, Prism is not positioned as an autonomous scientist. Human judgment remains central. The AI suggests, drafts, and reorganises, but it does not decide what is true. That distinction matters in fields where errors can ripple into real-world consequences. Why OpenAI thinks this could change science The deeper bet behind Prism is about productivity and accessibility. Writing papers, managing code, and documenting experiments consume a huge share of researchers' time. By smoothing those tasks, OpenAI argues that scientists can spend more energy on thinking, designing experiments, and interpreting results. There is also a cultural shift at play. Younger researchers already rely on chat-based tools to learn, prototype, and debug. Prism formalises that habit and pushes it into the core of scientific work. If successful, it could lower barriers for interdisciplinary research, where unfamiliar tools and formats often slow progress. Scepticism is inevitable. Critics worry that conversational workflows may obscure assumptions, encourage overreliance on AI-generated text, or blur accountability in research outputs. Others point out that science thrives on rigor, not vibes. OpenAI's response is that Prism is a workspace, not an authority. It reflects the user's intent and inputs, amplifying good practices or bad ones alike. Used carefully, it could accelerate discovery. Used carelessly, it could just as easily introduce noise. Whether "vibe coding science" becomes a lasting model or a passing experiment remains to be seen. What Prism makes clear is that AI's role in research is shifting. The question is no longer whether AI can help scientists, but how deeply it should be woven into the act of thinking itself.

ChatGPT Prism: What is it, top features, how it works and step-by-step guide to use it

Prism is free with a ChatGPT account and will expand soon to Business, Enterprise and Education plans. OpenAI has introduced Prism, an all-new AI-powered workspace designed for simplifying how scientists write, collaborate and publish research. Built specifically for scientific workflows, Prism integrates GPT-5.2 directly into a cloud-based, LaTeX-native environment, aiming to reduce the fragmentation that researchers face while juggling multiple tools. It is available for free to users with a personal ChatGPT account. The Prism allows unlimited projects and collaborators, with broader availability for Business, Enterprise, and Education users coming soon. Here's everything, including the top features and how it works. ChatGPT Prism: Top features Prism combines scientific writing and AI reasoning in a single workspace. The researchers can draft and revise papers with full contextual awareness of equations, references and figures. The platform supports real-time collaboration, literature discovery, equation handling and even converts handwritten diagrams into LaTeX. OpenAI also offers voice-based editing for quick and hands-free changes. Also read: Sam Altman takes a swipe at Mark Zuckerberg in internal OpenAI message to employees How ChatGPT Prism works GPT-5.2 is embedded directly into the document workflow, allowing researchers to chat, edit, and reason within the manuscript itself. Instead of switching between tools, users interact with AI in context, making revisions or exploring ideas without breaking focus. Here's a complete step-by-step guide to using it.