{"id":17070,"date":"2026-01-27T18:28:42","date_gmt":"2026-01-27T18:28:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/27\/openais-latest-product-lets-you-vibe-code-science\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T18:28:42","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T18:28:42","slug":"openais-latest-product-lets-you-vibe-code-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/27\/openais-latest-product-lets-you-vibe-code-science\/","title":{"rendered":"OpenAI\u2019s latest product lets you vibe code science"},"content":{"rendered":"
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OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for Science<\/a>, 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s vibe coding<\/a>, but for science.<\/p>\n

Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, pushes that analogy himself. \u201cI think 2026 will be for AI and science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering,\u201d he said at a press briefing yesterday. \u201cWe\u2019re starting to see that same kind of inflection.\u201d<\/p>\n

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. \u201cThat tells us that AI is moving from curiosity to core workflow for scientists,\u201d Weil said.<\/p>\n

Prism is a response to that user behavior. It can also be seen as a bid to lock in more scientists to OpenAI\u2019s products in a marketplace full of rival chatbots.<\/p>\n

\u201cI mostly use GPT-5 for writing code,\u201d says Roland Dunbrack, a professor of biology at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, who is not connected to OpenAI. \u201cOccasionally, 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

Nikita Zhivotovskiy, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, says GPT-5 has already become an important tool in his work. \u201cIt sometimes helps polish the text of papers, catching mathematical typos or bugs, and provides generally useful feedback,\u201d he says. \u201cIt is extremely helpful for quick summarization of research articles, making interaction with the scientific literature smoother.\u201d<\/p>\n

By combining a chatbot with an everyday piece of software, Prism follows a trend set by products such as OpenAI\u2019s Atlas<\/a>, which embeds ChatGPT in a web browser, as well as LLM-powered office tools from firms such as Microsoft and Google DeepMind.<\/p>\n

Prism incorporates GPT-5.2, the company\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s clear that Prism could be a huge time saver. It\u2019s also clear that a lot of people may be disappointed, especially after weeks of high-profile social media chatter<\/a> from researchers at the firm about how good GPT-5 is at solving math problems. Science is drowning in AI slop<\/a>: Won\u2019t this just make it worse? Where is OpenAI\u2019s fully automated AI scientist<\/a>? And when will GPT-5 make a stunning new discovery<\/a>?<\/p>\n

That\u2019s not the mission, says Weil. He would love to see GPT-5 make a discovery. But he doesn\u2019t think that\u2019s what will have the biggest impact on science, at least not in the near term.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think more powerfully\u2014and with 100% probability\u2014there\u2019s going to be 10,000 advances in science that maybe wouldn\u2019t have happened or wouldn\u2019t have happened as quickly, and AI will have been a contributor to that,\u201d Weil told MIT Technology Review<\/em> in an exclusive interview<\/a> this week. \u201cIt won\u2019t be this shining beacon\u2014it will just be an incremental, compounding acceleration.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OpenAI just revealed what its new in-house team, OpenAI for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"content-type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[226],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17070","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-technology"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17070","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=17070"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17070\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=17070"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=17070"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ideainthebox.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=17070"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}