# ⚡️ Prism: OpenAI's LaTeX "Cursor for Scientists" — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science Latent Space · 2026-01-27 Kevin Weil (VP of OpenAI for Science) and Victor Powell (Prism product lead) launch Prism, a free AI-native LaTeX editor that embeds GPT-5.2 directly into the scientific writing workflow, eliminating copy-pasting between ChatGPT and Overleaf and turning weeks of LaTeX formatting into minutes of natural language instruction. The origin story reveals Kevin discovered Victor's stealth company Cricket on Reddit and DM'd him to bring the team into OpenAI. In the live demo, Prism proofreads papers paragraph by paragraph, converts a whiteboard commutative diagram photo into TikZ code, generates 30 pages of general relativity lecture notes in seconds, and verifies complex symmetry equations in parallel chat sessions. They argue that LaTeX typesetting is the bottleneck diverting scientists from actual research, and that unlimited free collaboration and multi-line diff generation make Prism a 'tool for thought' rather than just a publishing tool. Kevin predicts 2026 will be for AI in science what 2025 was for AI in software engineering — a year when it becomes essential. The discussion also covers OpenAI's approach to accelerating science broadly, including the role of robotic labs and… ## Questions this episode answers ### What is OpenAI's Prism and how does it help scientists with LaTeX? Prism is a free AI-native LaTeX editor that embeds GPT-5.2 directly into the scientific publishing workflow, according to Kevin Weil, VP of OpenAI for Science. It eliminates copying and pasting between ChatGPT and LaTeX tools by giving the AI full context on project files. Scientists can proofread paragraphs, convert whiteboard diagrams into TikZ code, generate lecture notes, and verify equations in parallel chats, turning weeks of typesetting into minutes of natural language instruction. [0:34](https://addtry.com/7ff79ff2-33d5-4220-a462-6ec1e6120a3f?t=34000) ### How did Kevin Weil discover and acquire the team that built Prism? Kevin Weil found a stealth LaTeX company called Cricket on a Reddit forum while searching for innovations in scientific publishing tools. Unable to easily identify the founder, he eventually tracked down Victor Powell on Twitter and sent him a direct message out of the blue. After Zoom calls and a meeting in San Francisco, OpenAI acquired the team, and Cricket’s product became the foundation for Prism, as recounted by Weil and Powell. [4:06](https://addtry.com/7ff79ff2-33d5-4220-a462-6ec1e6120a3f?t=246000) ### What does Kevin Weil predict for AI in science in 2026? Kevin Weil predicts that 2026 for AI in science will mirror 2025 for software engineering: using AI to write code in early 2025 was for early adopters, but by year’s end, not using it meant falling behind. He expects the same rapid shift for science, with models solving open problems and tools like Prism embedding AI into workflows, accelerating discovery. [23:58](https://addtry.com/7ff79ff2-33d5-4220-a462-6ec1e6120a3f?t=1438000) ## Key moments - **[0:00] Prism Launch** - [0:34] Kevin Weil announces Prism, a free AI-native LaTeX editor with GPT-5.2 embedded directly into the workflow. - [0:53] LaTeX is the standard for scientific papers but the tools for writing it haven't changed in decades. - [1:28] Kevin Weil: OpenAI for Science aims to accelerate scientists by embedding AI into their actual workflows. - [2:46] "Every million copy and paste done in ChatGPT, there's probably some product to be built." - Alessio - **[3:09] Origin Story** - [3:41] Victor Powell left Meta three years ago and built Prism’s precursor as a solo project for a year and a half before joining OpenAI. - [4:27] Kevin Weil discovered Victor Powell’s stealth company Cricket via a Reddit forum and initiated acquisition in a Twitter DM. - **[5:53] Live Demo** - [7:07] Kevin Weil demos Prism proofreading a black hole paper’s introduction paragraph by paragraph using GPT-5.2. - [8:28] Kevin Weil uploads a whiteboard commutative diagram photo to Prism and gets TikZ LaTeX code generated instantly. - [11:00] Kevin Weil uses Prism’s parallel chat to verify a complex symmetry equation without editing the original document. - [11:33] Victor Powell generates 30 pages of general relativity lecture notes on Riemannian curvature in seconds using Prism. - [14:01] Kevin Weil: AI in Prism can flesh out proof bullet points and verify all references before publication. - [14:52] Victor Powell cautions that including AI-generated references you haven’t read defeats the purpose of scholarly citation. - **[15:51] Collab & Tech** - [15:51] Q: How does Prism support collaboration? A: Unlimited free collaborators and commenting, unlike other LaTeX tools. - [16:33] Victor Powell reveals Prism relies on the Monaco editor framework and handles multi-line diff generation for complex LaTeX edits. - [17:19] Prism initially used WebAssembly for in-browser LaTeX compilation but switched to backend rendering for better performance. - [18:13] Kevin Weil predicts Prism and Codex UIs could converge as AI becomes the primary interaction over document viewing. - **[19:06] UI Future** - **[20:09] AI Progress** - [21:12] Kevin Weil notes the rapid progression: from passing the SAT to solving open problems at the frontier of math and physics in two years. - [22:27] Kevin Weil observes that AI capabilities go from impossible to indispensable faster than we expect. - **[23:22] Bottlenecks** - [23:58] Kevin Weil predicts 2026 will be to AI for Science what 2025 was to AI for Software Engineering: from early adopters to falling behind if not used. - [24:51] Kevin Weil predicts robotic labs will become a major topic as AI shifts the bottleneck from idea generation to experimentation. - [26:06] Kevin Weil: "So in 2030, we could be doing 2050 level science" — accelerating science by decades. - **[26:24] Human+AI** - [28:02] Kevin Weil clarifies the goal is scientist + AI collaboration, not automation, to accelerate discovery. - **[29:27] Self-Acceleration** - [31:35] Kevin Weil: "Our goal is not to win a Nobel Prize ourselves. It is for 100 scientists to win Nobel Prizes using our technology." - [33:23] Kevin Weil confirms OpenAI plans an automated AI researcher intern by end of 2025 and a full researcher by September 2026. - **[35:16] Outro** - [35:30] Kevin Weil announces Prism is live and free at prism.openai.com, requiring only a ChatGPT account. ## Speakers - **RJ** (host) - **Kevin Weil** (guest) - **Victor Powell** (guest) ## Topics AI for Science ## Mentioned Cricket (company), Noetic (company), OpenAI (company), ChatGPT (product), Codex (product), GPT-5.2 (product), LaTeX (product), Monaco (product), Overleaf (product), Prism (product) ## Transcript ### Prism Launch **Host** [0:06] Okay, we're here at OpenAI with some exciting news from the AI for Science team. Uh, with us is Kevin Weil from, I guess you're VP of AI for Science? **Kevin Weil** [0:15] VP of OpenAI for Science, yep. **Host** [0:16] OpenAI for Science. And Victor Powell, um, who is the product lead on the new product that we're talking about today. Uh, and with me is our new AI for Science host, RJ. Welcome. **Victor Powell** [0:26] Hey. **Host** [0:26] Uh, so thanks for having us. **Kevin Weil** [0:27] Thanks for having us. **Victor Powell** [0:27] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [0:28] Yeah. **Victor Powell** [0:28] Yeah, it's very good to be here. **Host** [0:29] Yeah, uh, thanks for hosting us as, as well. It's always nice to come over to the office. Um, what are we announcing today? **Kevin Weil** [0:34] So we're launching Prism, which is, uh, an free AI native LaTeX editor. What does all that mean? Because probably a lot of people on the, the pod haven't worked with LaTeX in the past. LaTeX is a, a, a language effectively for typesetting mathematics, physics, and, you know, science in general. So if you're a, a scientist writing a paper, you're probably not using Google Docs because you need to-- You have diagrams, you have equations, et cetera. But it's-- And, and it's been the standard for decades. But the, the tools that, that people use to, to actually write LaTeX, write their papers, haven't changed in a long time. **Host** [1:12] Mm. **Kevin Weil** [1:12] And, uh, in particular, AI can help with a lot of the tasks, right? 'Cause y-you, you spend your time doing the science, you need to write it up. That's an important part of communicating your work. But you want that to be fast, and you, you want that to be accelerated, and AI can help in a ton of ways, and we'll talk about some of those. But if you, if you step back, right, i-is OpenAI for science, our goal is to accelerate science, and the surface area of science is very large. So we're, we're trying to build tools and products that help every scientist move faster with AI. Some of that is obviously the work that we can do with the model, making the model able to solve really hard scientific frontier, you know, frontier kind of problems, uh, allowing it to think for a long time. But it's not only that, right? If, if there was a lesson from what happened over the last year with software engineering, it's that part of the acceleration from, uh, in software engineering came from better models. But part of it also came from the fact that you now have, uh, AI embedded into the workflows, into the products that you use as a software engineer, right? It'd be one thing if we were going back and forth- **Host** [2:24] Mm-hmm **Kevin Weil** [2:24] ... copying and pasting code between, you know, ChatGPT and your IDE. That would be okay, that would be an acceleration. But the real acceleration came when you embedded AI into the actual workflow, and so that's what we're doing here. So OpenAI for Science, it's, it's both building great models for scientists and also speeding them up by bi- bringing AI into the workflow. That's what we're doing with Prism. **Host** [2:46] Yeah. I often say, like every million copy and paste done in ChatGPT, there's probably some product to be built. **Kevin Weil** [2:52] Right. Exactly. **Victor Powell** [2:53] That's a good analogy. **Kevin Weil** [2:54] Yeah. **Victor Powell** [2:54] That's a good way to look at it. Especially with LaTeX, having written a lot of LaTeX papers. **Kevin Weil** [2:59] Yes. **Host** [3:00] Yeah, yeah. So, so like- **Kevin Weil** [3:01] Yeah, me too. The, the number of hours as a grad student I spent, like, trying to get some diagram to line up exactly- **Victor Powell** [3:07] Exactly **Kevin Weil** [3:07] ... and oh, man. **Host** [3:09] Yeah. ### Origin Story **Victor Powell** [3:09] Cool. **Host** [3:09] Uh, and, uh, Victor, your, your-- this is your sort of baby. **Victor Powell** [3:13] Yeah, I guess, uh, it started off as, um, just a, a project. I, I left Meta about three years ago, um, trying to look for various different projects to start. Uh, and uh, this was, this was one that like, when I sort of presented it to people, they're like, "Oh, I get it. That's-- I, I see what you're doing." And so I've just been focused on that, building it for about a, about a year and a half. And, um, you know, it, it, it has, uh, now has become part of OpenAI, and that's been very exciting. **Host** [3:41] Congrats. **Victor Powell** [3:42] Thank you. Um- **Kevin Weil** [3:42] Yeah, so it's kind of a, kind of a fun story, right? I mean, we, as we were thinking, uh, we had this thesis around it's, it's not just models, it's also building models into the workflow and, and accelerating scientists in that way. And this is-- There are obviously a lot of different ways that you can do that, but the, the scientific collaboration and publishing, uh, thing is definitely one of them. And I was looking around, like, what is there in this space? And there hadn't been a lot of innovation for a long time. Uh, like it wasn't that different from when I was like writing up, you know, my assignments and papers in tech in grad school. And, uh, and then I found on this, uh, Reddit forum, maybe it was r/LaTeX, I don't remember, but somewhere on this Reddit forum, I found, uh, this thing about a company, uh, called Cricket. And, uh, I, I was, like, looking around. I couldn't find who the founder was. It took me a little while, and then I think I found you on Twitter and DM'd you out of the blue and just said, "Hey, I don't know if you want to talk about this, but I would love to talk about this if you're open to it," and gave you my number. And, uh, we talked on the phone and then like, um, jumped on a Zoom and eventually met in San Francisco and, uh, made it happen. **Victor Powell** [4:55] That's right. **Kevin Weil** [4:55] And it's, uh, it's awesome to have you guys here, but it's just, um... Yeah, I have a ton of respect for what you, what you started to build. **Victor Powell** [5:02] I actually never heard that full story from you until now. **Kevin Weil** [5:05] Yeah. **Host** [5:05] You gotta find that Reddit user and thank them, because, you know- **Victor Powell** [5:08] I thought it'd been me. **Kevin Weil** [5:10] Oh, yeah. I thought you were totally in stealth because, uh, it was, it was the hardest thing to actually figure out who the founder of this thing was. **Victor Powell** [5:16] That's- **Kevin Weil** [5:17] And then I was like, "Oh, for sure he's not gonna respond to my random DM." **Victor Powell** [5:21] I mean, I guess that's a part of, part of our focus has always just been entirely on product and to the point where it's almost embarrassing how little we focus on anything else. **Host** [5:30] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [5:30] Well, it worked out for you. **Victor Powell** [5:31] Yeah. **Host** [5:32] Also, full circle for a moment for you using Twitter to do your business development. **Victor Powell** [5:36] Yeah, that's right. **Host** [5:39] So that's kind of interesting. Um- **Kevin Weil** [5:40] Twitter DMs forever. **Host** [5:41] Uh, right. Like, uh, actually, yeah, like probably one of the most important social network, uh, innovations, I guess, is, is those, that stuff, and I'm sure you know a lot about that. Um, sh-shall we go right into a demo or- **Kevin Weil** [5:52] Yeah. Yeah **Host** [5:53] ... talk about it? Yeah. ### Live Demo **Kevin Weil** [5:53] It's always fun to show it. **Host** [5:56] Yes. **Kevin Weil** [5:56] Okay. So- **Host** [5:56] I, I'm a fan of, like, show, don't tell, push people to the video. **Kevin Weil** [5:59] Yeah. **Host** [6:00] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [6:00] All right. I'll try and arrange this so you guys can see a little bit. **Host** [6:02] Yes. **Kevin Weil** [6:03] Um, all right. So what you have here, so this is, this is Prism. Um, and- What you can see i- on the left here, this is actual LaTeX. You can see why you might want AI to help you write it because it's, you know- **Host** [6:17] A language **Kevin Weil** [6:17] ... a little bit... It's a language. **Host** [6:19] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [6:19] It's a little bit messy. And then on the right, this is my colleague's, uh, paper. Alex Lipsasque, he's a physicist. Um, this is a paper that he wrote on black holes. And so you see it over here, all the, all the la- you know, you can imagine trying to write this in, like, Google Docs or something, it'd be impossible. This is why LaTeX is, uh, super powerful. Um, and then, and you've got kind of your, your files here that make up the project. TeX file, which is the actual main source file, bibliography files, et cetera. And, um, you know, you can go through and you can change it, and then you compile that into, into the PDF itself. But here I can say, um, this is where y- at the bottom you can use the, the AI, you can use GPT-5.2. And I could say, you know, this introduction, maybe I want a little help writing the introduction. So, uh, help me proofread the introduction section paragraph by paragraph. Uh, suggest places where, where I can simplify my- **Victor Powell** [7:23] This is a live demo and- **Kevin Weil** [7:25] Right, which- **Victor Powell** [7:25] ... we, we're, we're working on it pretty heavily, so just, uh- Go... Are you nervous? Yeah, you can't be nervous. You're good. **Kevin Weil** [7:31] Spoken like a true founder. Um, and so one of the nice things is y- y- you could do this in ChatGPT, but you'd have to go upload your files into a chat, right? And you're going back and forth. Here, because the AI is built into the product, it has all of the files that are part of your project. It automatically puts them in context. It works the way you, you think it would work. So here it's looking at the files. All right, um, and it's given us kind of a diff here, so it's suggesting changes. You've got the, the part in red, which is the part that it's changing, the part in green, what it wants to change it to, and you can see the different places where it, uh, is suggesting that we change things. So, okay, we can... We'll just keep all of them, right? YOLO. Um- Hope Alex doesn't mind. **Victor Powell** [8:19] Here's- **Host** [8:19] Hope it's all true. **Kevin Weil** [8:20] Yeah. We're changing Alex's paper. What's the big deal? Um, so here's another thing. We were talking about diagrams in- **Host** [8:26] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [8:26] ... LaTeX. **Host** [8:27] Mm-hmm. **Kevin Weil** [8:28] Uh, so I've got a... Say I wanted to input a commutative diagram, right? It's really easy to draw a commutative diagram like this. **Host** [8:36] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [8:36] It is an absolute nightmare- **Host** [8:38] Yes. **Kevin Weil** [8:38] ... to put these things into TeX. So I will upload this photo, and I'll say here... Whoops. **Host** [8:47] Is there a Techbench for this kind of stuff? **Kevin Weil** [8:50] Uh, like a set of evals? **Host** [8:51] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [8:52] We totally need one. **Host** [8:53] Yeah, okay. **Kevin Weil** [8:53] I think there's an opportunity to do that, for sure. So here's a, a commutative diagram that I drew on the whiteboard. Can you make it into a TikZ diagram and put it right after the, I don't know, right after, right before, right at the top of the introduction section? Make sure you get the details right. **Host** [9:29] So, so I, I didn't wanna interrupt you while you were typing but- **Kevin Weil** [9:31] Yeah **Host** [9:31] ... why don't you use voice? **Kevin Weil** [9:33] Oh, actually, I should. **Host** [9:34] Yeah. No, no, no. **Kevin Weil** [9:34] I like... I totally could. Yeah. **Host** [9:35] No, but isn't it interesting that we all have these voice, bi- voice buttons and we don't use it? **Kevin Weil** [9:39] Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. **Host** [9:40] It's not second nature yet. **Kevin Weil** [9:41] Yeah. **Host** [9:42] Like, it's interesting. **Kevin Weil** [9:43] Um, and that one I, I totally should have. I was gonna also show something. So it... You have the, you have the f- the, you know, here I am in the TeX and it's working. You also can create new parallel chats. So you can have whole sessions with ChatGPT that you can be, you know, that can be going in parallel. **Host** [10:01] Mm-hmm. **Kevin Weil** [10:01] So here I'll ask it, um, there's all these equations. We're talking about symmetries of this, uh, of this black hole, uh, wave equation, and in particular, there's this complex symmetry here. Um- **Host** [10:14] Ooh, I like how it- **Kevin Weil** [10:15] And notice how- **Host** [10:16] ... syncs. Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [10:16] Yeah, notice how it syncs- **Host** [10:17] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [10:17] ... when I highlight it. But I'll say, like, why don't you... I'll go to my chat so I can start doing this in parallel, and I'll say, um, please make sure, or please, uh, verify that the H+ operator in the new symmetries section is indeed a symmetry of the stationary axisymmetric black hole- **Host** [10:44] Do you understand those questions? **Victor Powell** [10:45] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [10:45] ... wave equations. **Host** [10:45] I'm not even gonna lie, there are whole equations I have, but after that, I don't know. **Kevin Weil** [10:50] And I'll say- **Victor Powell** [10:50] I think Brandon is actually a natural physics person. **Host** [10:52] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [10:53] Yeah. I'll say, "Don't do it in the paper, you know, show it, show it here." I don't want it to actually, like, edit the paper. **Host** [10:59] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [10:59] I just want it to prove it here, right? **Host** [11:00] Yeah, yeah. **Kevin Weil** [11:00] Okay. So I'll get that going. Now, while we're waiting for the diagram to finish, we can also get another thing going in parallel. So I'll say, um, I need to write up a set of, uh, lecture notes on general relativity. You know, say I'm a professor, right? I've got... I'm teaching a class or something. Um, put together a, uh, 30-minute set of lecture notes on, uh, Riemannian curvature. **Host** [11:33] Wow. That's a very different task. **Kevin Weil** [11:36] Um, put it into the file I made, this grlecture.tex. Okay? And so I've got this going. All right. Well, it came back on my earlier one. H+ symmetry, is it really, uh, here you got ChatGPT doing a whole bunch of, uh, uh, of work to verify that this is indeed a symmetry of the equation. Okay. It does, it confirms it, right? So you've got the full power of a reasoning model that can think deeply about frontier science. Uh, and now we can go back while it works on the other thing- Okay, so it, it, this was where I was making the diagram, right? Uh, put it right below the introduction. I'll compile it again. So I do an- **Victor Powell** [12:19] Let's do an auto compile. **Kevin Weil** [12:20] Uh- **RJ** [12:21] Actually, you can turn that on. **Kevin Weil** [12:22] Yeah. **RJ** [12:22] Okay. **Kevin Weil** [12:23] And look. **RJ** [12:23] Oh, there it is. **Kevin Weil** [12:23] Wow, it, it nailed it. Um, so it looks like it got it pretty much exactly. **RJ** [12:29] Just a small- **Victor Powell** [12:30] Check, check the details. **Kevin Weil** [12:31] Oh, yeah **Victor Powell** [12:31] Check the details. **Kevin Weil** [12:32] Uh-oh. **RJ** [12:32] Good enough for me. **Kevin Weil** [12:33] Yeah, it's pretty good, but all right, we can, we can see if it'll get it right. Let's say, um, uh, the C vertex should be directly below- **Victor Powell** [12:43] To your point about voice, though, I do think, uh, maybe over time, the code kind of might recede into the background more as you're just really interact- you're interacting with the paper. **RJ** [12:53] Mm-hmm. Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [12:53] Yeah. **RJ** [12:53] You're, you're vibrating that conversation with it. **Victor Powell** [12:55] Yeah. **RJ** [12:56] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [12:56] Yeah. **Victor Powell** [12:56] When you, when you started this product, w- is this how you're envisioning it would be used, or were there other design choices that you were considering and you didn't take that path? **RJ** [13:05] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [13:05] Um, by the way, before you answer- **Victor Powell** [13:06] Yeah, yeah **Kevin Weil** [13:06] ... we have our s- we have our, uh, general relativity lecture notes here. **Victor Powell** [13:10] Well, that was quick. **Kevin Weil** [13:11] So- **Victor Powell** [13:11] 30 minutes? **Kevin Weil** [13:13] This is a- **Victor Powell** [13:13] Six pages. **Kevin Weil** [13:14] Yeah, so 30 page, uh, 30-minute section. Okay, so we got curvature, covariant derivatives. Yeah, this looks like a reasonable set of, uh, of notes if you were gonna go teach a class, right? **Victor Powell** [13:26] Oh, my God. **Kevin Weil** [13:26] It just did it for you. Um- **Victor Powell** [13:27] Or you can think, like, you know, generate the problem set for, for this week. **Kevin Weil** [13:31] Yeah, right. You've got work... So it's got some examples here. We could tell it to, like, work out solutions to the examples. Um- **Victor Powell** [13:36] That's sort of a hidden feature of LaTeX too that it, it actually makes it pretty easy to generate problem sets with, like, answer sheets and things like this. **Kevin Weil** [13:44] Mm-hmm. **Victor Powell** [13:44] There's so many, there's so many cool features of LaTeX that I think, uh, are underutilized. **Kevin Weil** [13:49] Yeah. So anyways, you can see, uh, we, we went e- we, we, uh, had it proofread the paper. We had it check some of the answers, uh, to verify that our calculations were correct. We generated a set of lecture notes. We added a diagram that we didn't have to actually type up ourselves, which I promise you is horrendous. And that's just, uh... You know, we did that all, all basically in parallel. And, you know, you can imagine lots of other things. You can... You... If you have a proof that you, you know, you maybe have, like, the, the sort of the bullet points on a proof, you can just say, "Here are the bullet points, now flesh it out for me." You can imagine having it check all of your references before you publish, make sure all of them are real, up to date. You can imagine having it generate your references based on the topic of... You know? So like- **Victor Powell** [14:31] Oh my God, that would be AI **Kevin Weil** [14:32] ... there's just so many areas where AI can help. **RJ** [14:34] That's a big problem when you're trying to put together a paper is get all the references, right? **Victor Powell** [14:38] Yeah. Well, okay, so, so- **Kevin Weil** [14:39] And, and all of this is time that used to go to, you know, typing up- **Victor Powell** [14:45] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [14:45] ... a paper. **RJ** [14:45] Not science **Kevin Weil** [14:46] And not science. **RJ** [14:47] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [14:47] And now it could go back to science, and that's just one of the ways that we look at accelerating scientists all over the world. **Victor Powell** [14:52] Yeah. I, I would say, uh, definitely, you know, be careful about including references you haven't read. Right? Because, like, th- that's the whole point. Like, you can include 100 references, but if you didn't read them, then you might as well not have them. **Kevin Weil** [15:04] Mm-hmm. **Victor Powell** [15:04] Uh, but yeah, I, I think that web connection is, is very important and... But, uh, is this stock GPT-5 or, uh- **Kevin Weil** [15:11] It's GPT- **Victor Powell** [15:11] ... is this, like, a fine-tuned? **Kevin Weil** [15:12] GPT-5.2. Yeah. **Victor Powell** [15:13] Okay, yeah. **Kevin Weil** [15:14] Um, but and by the way, you, uh, when you're looking at references, you can also ask ChatGPT to help you understand the reference. You know, read this paper, tell me the relevance. **Victor Powell** [15:23] Oh. **Kevin Weil** [15:23] So all of the things that you might wanna do to accelerate your work, you can just do from within this interface. **RJ** [15:28] You still have to do your work. **Kevin Weil** [15:29] Yeah. **RJ** [15:30] But it should make it, it should make it faster, especially, like, even linking to the references, so you can go and verify, like, okay, this is this one. So this might also make it easier to write the paper as you do the work, right? Rather than, rather than, oh, okay, now I gotta spend two days in LaTeX land- **Victor Powell** [15:46] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [15:46] Mm-hmm **RJ** [15:46] ... like, trying to get my paper right. **Victor Powell** [15:48] Like a tool for thought rather than just a publishing tool. **RJ** [15:50] Yeah, yeah. **Kevin Weil** [15:51] Yeah, yeah. ### Collab & Tech **RJ** [15:51] What about collaboration? **Kevin Weil** [15:53] It's a great... Yeah. **RJ** [15:54] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [15:54] So it's built for... I mean, you can speak to this well. It's built for collaboration. **RJ** [15:58] Mm-hmm. **Kevin Weil** [15:58] So you can bring on as many, uh, uh, collaborators as you want. **RJ** [16:03] Okay. **Kevin Weil** [16:03] Which is nice. **RJ** [16:04] Yeah, yeah. **Kevin Weil** [16:04] I think most other tools in the space have hard limits and charge you money and other things. In Prism, it's as many collaborators as you want for free. **RJ** [16:11] Commenting. **Kevin Weil** [16:12] Um, yeah, so you've got commenting. You've got all the kind of collaboration tools that you would want. **RJ** [16:16] Awesome. Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [16:16] Um- **RJ** [16:17] Good. **Victor Powell** [16:18] And then any other, like, engineering choices, like, um, you know, what might engineers not appreciate when just looking at a tool like this? Um, you know, of- often it would be, like, multi-line, uh, diff generation that you need to do because you're editing a pretty complex document. It does get pretty complicated. I mean, we're using, um... If, uh... Let me know if I'm getting too technical into the weeds. **Kevin Weil** [16:38] No. **Victor Powell** [16:38] But, uh, you know, we're relying heavily on the Monaco, uh, uh, JavaScript framework. Um, so that- I- I'm very f- familiar with the lack of documentation of Monaco. That's actually... See, it's interesting you say that because it's, it's very true that it's extremely powerful library that is almost entirely undocumented. **RJ** [16:55] Yeah. **Victor Powell** [16:55] So it's just text. **Kevin Weil** [16:56] But you can use Codex now to generate the documentation for you. **Victor Powell** [17:00] Yeah. You, you'd think Microsoft should get on that. Uh, but yeah, yeah. You know, like, just stuff like that. Like, I, I like to hear about, like, the behind the scenes of, like, building something like this. What, what do you, what do you struggle with? What's the model really, like, surprisingly good at, and what's the model it should be good at but it's not? **Kevin Weil** [17:14] What were some of the hardest problems as you were building this in the first place? What are the, some of the hardest things to get right? **Victor Powell** [17:19] I think, um, initially, maybe one interesting challenge was that we really pushed on it being, um, WebAssembly and fully just running in the browser at first. **Kevin Weil** [17:27] Yeah. **Victor Powell** [17:27] The whole entire LaTeX compilation. And that did help us in the sense that we were able to, like, flesh out the design and the AI capabilities early on without having to invest heavily in, like, the back end infrastructure. Uh, but eventually, we did hit a wall with that approach, and once we switched it to, uh, back end PDF rendering, like, that's when we really started to hit, hit an inflection point with, like, usage. **RJ** [17:47] Mm. Yeah, fast. **Kevin Weil** [17:49] Yeah. **RJ** [17:50] Yeah. **Victor Powell** [17:51] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [17:51] I think we also... The AI in here benefits a lot from everything that we've learned building Codex. **RJ** [17:56] Mm-hmm. **Kevin Weil** [17:56] Um, and, uh, as we go forward, I think we'll likely just integrate the in- the full Codex harness into the application here, so you get all the benefits of the tools and the skills and all the things that Codex can do today. **RJ** [18:08] Mm-hmm. **Kevin Weil** [18:08] Uh, and you just sort of automatically can bring that into your environment here. **Victor Powell** [18:13] Yeah. Is there a future they're just the same app? **Kevin Weil** [18:15] Uh, maybe. Uh- I think potentially it depends on, I mean, I, I, here's... The reason I'm hesitating is I think the, the interesting thing with, um, with this and with Codex is we're still mostly in a world today where people are, you have, you know, your, your main screen is your, is your document, and then you have your AI on the side. But the more that AI, that improves, people trust it, and they're just YOLOing it, right? You're like, you're generating code and you're, you're like looking at the code is sort of secondary to instructing the AI and, and- Mm-hmm ... driving from that. The UI probably changes for all of these things, right? Mm-hmm. You don't, you don't need your, your document front and center because you're actually not looking at your document as much. You're, that's sort of your backup and your interaction with your AI is primary. I would- And as that happens, I think you might, the, these, these UIs can kind of converge over time. So we'll see. Uh, but I definitely would love to see a world where people needed to spend less time thinking about the actual syntax and much more about what they're trying to create. ### UI Future **Kevin Weil** [19:22] Yeah, I mean, I, I, I feel like this plus a notebook would be amazing. Yeah. Because, because in, and something that the, uh, the AI can run quite, you know, run, run a analysis, generate plots, oh, stick that in the paper here. Like oh read, you know, like this paper, like this part of the paper. Like take that equation and like, you know, do something with it. That would be a really amazing, uh, integration. Yeah. Yeah. Like think through the different corollaries of this thing from this paper- Yeah ... and produce some alternatives, and then like, yeah. I, I completely agree. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I do think that's sort of the progression where it's like doing, doing maybe work for a few seconds versus maybe we're already at a point where it's doing work for a few minutes, eventually doing work for hours, days, coming back with very complicated analysis. Mm-hmm. Yeah. I mean, that, that, that's actually maybe a good segue into some of the other questions that I had about your, um, your initiative. I mean, uh, so stepping back to AI for science in general, um, can you talk a little bit, I, I mean, I have a million questions . ### AI Progress **Kevin Weil** [20:26] But, uh, maybe start with what I... Okay, I feel that validation of AI for science, so, uh, is critical to its success, right? You have to have- Of course ... some sort of, um, real world validation of, of the results that you produce with your AI, right? So what are the, I, w- I know that there's been some publicity in the, in the past. What are the, like the latest and greatest hits of the things that big labs or any lab is doing with, uh, with OpenAI's AIs? Uh, oh, I mean, when you step back and look at the trend, I think that's the biggest thing because we can, we can debate exactly like you've probably seen in, in the last few weeks even- Math stuff ... there've been a bunch of different examples of like GPT-5.2 contributing to open Erdos problems and things like that. And you get into this debate of, well, was it, uh, w- was it really just really good at literature search and it found an example over here, an example over here, and when you combine the two- Yeah ... you know, the, it was sort of a trivial s- step from there to the solution? Yeah. And was that novel or did it really do something new? And, you know, that's a, that it's a legitimate discussion. But when you step back, two years ago we were like, "You know, this thing can pass the SAT. That's amazing." And, uh, and then- And now it's solving real problems ... and then you progress to like it can do a little bit of contest math, and it can start to solve harder problems. Wow. And then you keep going, and it's starting to solve graduate level problems, and then you have a model that gets a gold medal at the IMO, and now we're sitting here talking about, you know, it solving open problems at the frontier of math and physics and biology and other fields. So it, it's just, I mean, the progression is incredible, and if you think about where we are today, then you fast-forward six months, 12 months, I, I, I'm very optimistic about what the models are going to be do, able to do to accelerate science. Yeah. It's like it's already happening, and if there's one thing that I've learned from, uh, my like two-ish years at OpenAI, it's- Mm ... you go very quickly from this, this thing is just impossible for AI to do. Like it's too hard, AI can't do it, to like AI can just barely do it, and it like kind of doesn't work and, you know, only early adopters are doing it because it's not particularly reliable yet, but it like sort of works, to oh my God, AI like does this thing really well and I could never imagine not using AI for this in the future. It's like once you start to get to, you know, 5, 10% on some particular eval, you very quickly go to like 60, 70, 80. Mm-hmm. And we're just at the phase where AI can help in some, not all, but in some elements of frontier science, math, you know, biology, chemistry, et cetera. ### Bottlenecks **Kevin Weil** [23:22] And it, it just means we're like right at the- We're right at the cusp ... at the, at the cusp, and it's super exciting. Yeah. So I mean, so it, it, fast-forward a year- Yeah ... you know, the end of the year, uh, and we have AIs that can do, you know, a lot of this, um, discovery process, then the bottleneck becomes the wet lab or the, the lab, right? Yeah. So what, what, what is, what are you seeing, um, in that domain? Yeah, I, I, by the way, I totally, we were talking a little bit about software engineering before and the analogies. I think 2026 for AI and science is going to look a lot like what 2025 looked like for soft- AI and software engineering. Yeah. Where if you go back to the beginning of 2025, if you were using AI heavily to write your code, you were sort of an early adopter. Yeah. And it like kind of worked and, but it wasn't, like certainly not everybody was doing it. And then you fast-forward 12 months, and at the end of 2025, if you are not using AI to write a lot of your code, you're probably falling behind. I think we're gonna see that same kind of, uh, of progression in AI and science where, you know, today it's ear- early adopters, but you're really starting to see some proof points in solving open problems and, you know, developing new kinds of proteins and things like that. Um, but you're right. As it, as it really starts to work, and I think this is the year that it's really going to start to work, uh, it, it, it shifts the bottleneck, and I think we're gonna be starting to talk a lot more about robotic labs and other things. **RJ** [24:51] Mm-hmm. **Kevin Weil** [24:51] You know, like, do you need to have a grad student, like, pipetting things? **RJ** [24:57] No. **Host** [24:58] Right, right. **Kevin Weil** [24:58] Probably not, right? Right now you do. **Host** [25:00] But yeah, because it, it doesn't work. **Kevin Weil** [25:01] But why, why shouldn't we have, why shouldn't we have, uh, robotic labs that, where you have AI models doing what they do best, reasoning over a huge amount of, of different information. Um, you know, they, they have read substantially every paper in every field and can bring a lot of information to bear to help prune the search tree on, you know, a new material, for example, that you're trying to create. And then you have a robotic lab that can, uh, roll out a bunch of experiments in parallel, do them while we sleep, um, and then feed the results back into the AI, let it, uh, learn from them, design the next set of experiments and go. **RJ** [25:38] It's like YOLO science. **Kevin Weil** [25:38] I, I mean, it's hard to imagine. That's like... It doesn't even have to be YOLO science, right? To your point, it's, you're verifying it as you go- **RJ** [25:44] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [25:44] ... 'cause you have an actual lab building it in real life. **RJ** [25:48] Yeah. Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [25:48] Um, but you can just do so much more in parallel. You can think harder upfront with AI to design the experiments. **RJ** [25:53] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [25:53] Uh, and then again, like, prune the search tree so you're, you're searching over a smaller number of higher value targets, and then you automate the experimentation, uh, and, and turn it around faster. And again, like, this is acceleration. Like, the whole- **RJ** [26:06] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [26:07] ... I- I- if we're successful, then it's y- you end up doing, you know, maybe the next 25 years of science in 5 years instead. So in 2030, we could be doing 2050 level science, and that would be an awesome outcome. **RJ** [26:22] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [26:22] Like, the world is a better place if that happens. **RJ** [26:24] Yeah. Absolutely. I, I guess, uh, so we spoke recently with Heather Kulik at MIT, and sh- one of the things she pointed out was that there's a e- element of serendipity to working in a lab that you lose. ### Human+AI **Kevin Weil** [26:34] Uh-huh. **RJ** [26:35] And so she was of the opinion that there's a class of problems, especially when you have, like, a large search space or something like that, where robotics is gonna really accelerate science, and there's another class of problems where even experimental science will not move forward very fast b- because of robotics. And so then, again, you're at a bottleneck. But I guess humans need something to do, so **Kevin Weil** [26:56] Well, uh, uh, that, uh, what she said sounds totally reasonable to me, right? **RJ** [26:59] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [26:59] There are probably places where the humans are adding no value because they're literally just trying to- **RJ** [27:04] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [27:04] ... pipette a certain amount of a thing into another thing or, you know, do some, uh, the same motion repeatedly in a bunch of different ways. And then there are places where it, it's less well understood. You want the full flexibility that you have of a really smart human thinking about the work that they're doing. Um, by the way, the same is true in, in, uh, the more theoretical fields as well. **RJ** [27:25] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [27:26] Where it's not, this isn't about let's automate all the humans out of their jobs. This is about accelerating scientists. It's scientist plus AI together being better than scientist alone or AI alone. **RJ** [27:38] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [27:38] Um, and I think the same is true whether you're talking something that's happening in silico proving a theoretical problem or happening in the real world with a lab. Like, find the parts that you don't need a human to do and try and automate them as much as you possibly can so that the humans can spend their time on the most valuable things. **Host** [27:55] Yeah. I, I'm very pro, like, the in silico, uh, acceleration because obviously you have more control over that, and you can parallelize and repeat and- **Kevin Weil** [28:02] Yeah **Host** [28:02] ... do all those, all those things. **Kevin Weil** [28:04] Yeah. I think there will be a huge amount of value in, you know, a lot of fields are, are heavily simulatable, and- **Host** [28:11] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [28:11] ... they, you know, a- and so, you know, nuclear fusion, for example, they're running a lot of simulations before they do any particular experiment 'cause the experiments are very time-consuming and expensive. **Host** [28:21] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [28:21] Um, but I'm excited to see what you can do when you have a, a loop between, you know, a, a, a very intelligent reasoning model that understands fusion and a simulation, and you get the model thinking about what parameters to set for the simulation and then running, you know, a bunch of simulations in parallel, feeding that back. And you have that same sort of lab loop except it's all in silico and in, in an exper- in, in, um, you're running on a giant GPU cluster. **Host** [28:49] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [28:49] And then when you really have, like, gotten to the end of that calculation, then you go run it in- **Host** [28:54] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [28:55] ... uh, IRL. **RJ** [28:56] This, bringing it back to Prism, this is sort of a n- a nice aspect that you're, you're getting a more sophisticated view of your result, right? Instead of just, um, you know, like a chat output. And it, I would, I would hope as it develops as a way for a scientist to be able to interact with the information before you kick off your nuclear fusion experiment for, you know, $10 million or whatever. **Kevin Weil** [29:19] Mm-hmm. **RJ** [29:20] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [29:20] And the human can learn from more things, right? **RJ** [29:22] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [29:22] You just, you get more data that you can, that you can look at and evaluate. So. **RJ** [29:26] Yeah. ### Self-Acceleration **Host** [29:27] So this, by the way, this fusion discussion makes me think, like, you know, if one day OpenAI for science, you know, it gets serious enough and starts to self-accelerate, you should solve cold fusion and, you know, be your own power source. **Kevin Weil** [29:40] Yeah. Well, I mean, this is, this is why we're so excited about this, right? I mean, imagine our, our, our mission is, is to, you know, to, to bring AGI to the world in a way that's beneficial to all of humanity and- **Host** [29:52] It's right there at the lobby. **Kevin Weil** [29:53] Yeah. Yeah. **Host** [29:53] It's amazing. You see it every, you, you, every day you walk in, you see it. **Kevin Weil** [29:56] Yeah. Absolutely. And, and i- imagine, I mean, if we had GPT-9 inside of ChatGPT today, it would be awesome. You could do lots of things. But if you had GPT-9 and it could, um, which I'm using as a stand-in for AGI, right? **Host** [30:09] Yeah, yeah. **Kevin Weil** [30:09] A- a- and, and it could create new materials, and we were, the devices we were using were all incredible and, you know, had 30-day battery lives and things like that, and we had personalized medicine, and we all knew someone whose life was saved because we were developing personalized, you know- **RJ** [30:27] Uh, cancer treatments **Kevin Weil** [30:29] ... cancer treatments and things so much faster, like that's the real benefit- **RJ** [30:33] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [30:33] ... of AGI. That's, I think, maybe the most tangible way that we're all gonna feel AGI as it starts to be real. **RJ** [30:39] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [30:39] And that's why this work is so mission-driven for us. **RJ** [30:42] So, so that does, it brings up, like, kinda two questions in my mind. One is, the first one is, so then who, uh, who owns the invention? And then the other half of that is, okay, so then does, does OpenAI become a drug company and a fusion company? And, and, right? 'Cause this is how, I mean, it- you laugh, but it's a little bit serious that l- all the AI for drug discovery companies ended up being drug companies because they couldn't sell the, so far, with some exceptions now, with Noetic, for example. But they end up being drug companies because they can't sell the, the, the drug. But in any event, that there's, like, a lot of precedence for using, uh, basically building your own portfolio using, uh, AI. So like, are you thinking about that, that angle? Or this is right now, you're just let's get what's enable scientists for outside of OpenAI. **Kevin Weil** [31:35] Yeah, I mean, my, my personal belief about, uh, as we drive towards AGI- **RJ** [31:39] Mm-hmm **Kevin Weil** [31:39] ... is not that we're gonna, we're gonna create AGI, and then we're all gonna, like, sit back and enjoy our universal basic income and, like, write poetry. **RJ** [31:48] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [31:49] I, I, we're, people, it, the future will involve, uh, I mean, especially advanced science is going to involve experts helping to drive these models. It, and I don't believe that any one company is just gonna do everything. **RJ** [32:03] Mm-hmm. Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [32:04] Right? It's why we're focusing on, first and foremost, on accelerating scientists outside of these walls, right? Our goal is not to win a Nobel Prize ourselves. It is for 100 scientists to win Nobel Prizes using our technology. **RJ** [32:17] Mm. **Host** [32:17] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [32:18] And at the same time- **RJ** [32:18] That would be great **Kevin Weil** [32:18] ... I think there are, there are, like, places where sometimes you actually, when you're trying to build for other people, you learn best if you actually try and go end-to-end on something. **RJ** [32:27] Yeah, you do. **Kevin Weil** [32:27] Because then you're your own customer, and you g- you understand it in a tighter loop than you would if you were purely building for people outside the walls. So I think it makes sense for us to take a handful of bets like that- **RJ** [32:37] Mm-hmm **Kevin Weil** [32:38] ... but by and large, we're gonna partner because the, the surface area of science is massive- **RJ** [32:42] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [32:43] ... and we want to accelerate all of science. **RJ** [32:45] Yeah. **Host** [32:46] Yeah, we're covering all sorts of disciplines from, like, chemistry to- **Kevin Weil** [32:49] Yeah, we are **Host** [32:50] ... structural biology. **RJ** [32:51] Already. **Kevin Weil** [32:51] Yeah. **RJ** [32:52] And we're, we're releasing the first- **Host** [32:54] To math **RJ** [32:54] ... first episode- **Kevin Weil** [32:55] Yeah **RJ** [32:55] ... this week, so. **Host** [32:55] Material science. **RJ** [32:56] Yeah. **Host** [32:56] It's all over the place. Uh, it's, but, but there's a lot to do. Uh, one thing I did want to, to bring across also was, uh, it, it, so AI for Science sits within the broader sort of research- **Kevin Weil** [33:05] Mm-hmm **Host** [33:05] ... uh, org- **Kevin Weil** [33:06] Yeah **Host** [33:06] ... at OpenAI. And, you know, one of the more, more interesting things is, like, self-acceleration, let's call it- **Kevin Weil** [33:11] Mm-hmm **Host** [33:12] ... you know, um, uh, where Jakub has very publicly declared that we'll have a automated researcher by September 2026. **Kevin Weil** [33:19] Yeah. **Host** [33:20] Now, I was wondering- **Kevin Weil** [33:20] The beginnings of one, I think you said, right? And it, it's like the- **Host** [33:22] Yeah, well- **Kevin Weil** [33:22] ... intern version this year. **Host** [33:23] There you go. **Kevin Weil** [33:23] And then, yeah. **Host** [33:24] Right, first product. **Kevin Weil** [33:24] Yep, yep. **Host** [33:25] Uh, and I'm sure you have more cooking in, in- internally, but like, why so soon? Like, that's eight months away, and, uh- **Kevin Weil** [33:31] Yeah **Host** [33:31] ... what, what's the, what's the goal there? What, you know, just anything about that that you can share. **Kevin Weil** [33:34] Yeah, I mean, eight months, that feels like forever in this industry. **RJ** [33:39] AGI by then. **Kevin Weil** [33:39] Basically infinite time. Um, I mean, no, it's exactly what you said, right? It's if, uh, if, if we can, if we can create, uh, a, a model, an AI researcher that is, um, that can actually do novel AI research, then we can move way faster, right? We will, we will self-accelerate. Uh, we can discover more things quickly. We can apply GPUs and compute to, to moving our own research faster, and that just means that we can improve our models at a faster rate, and every bit that we improve our models means that we are a step closer to bringing AGI and all the things that we were talking about with personalized medicine and new materials and, like, we can bring these amazing things into the world faster. **RJ** [34:21] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [34:22] So it is about self-acceleration. **RJ** [34:24] Yeah. **Host** [34:24] I think one, one thing I'm also trying to figure out is how closely is machine learning research, which is a science- **Kevin Weil** [34:31] Yeah **Host** [34:31] ... uh, or high-performance compute, which is also something that you guys are doing a lot of, uh, close to the hard, traditional hard sciences, let's call it, like physics- **Kevin Weil** [34:41] Yeah **Host** [34:41] ... and chemistry. **Kevin Weil** [34:42] I, I think in a lot of ways it's cor- it's sort of a parallel effort to this. Like, it is- **Host** [34:46] Yeah **Kevin Weil** [34:46] ... the work that we're trying to do with AI, OpenAI for science and accelerating other scientists, the parallel internally is they're trying to, uh, build products and models for AI researchers to accelerate them. So it's a, there, there's a lot of sort of, uh, parallelism to these two work streams. They're, they're similar in, in, uh, in, in goal, just for a different set of users. **Host** [35:12] Yeah, okay. Um, any parting thoughts, questions, anything we should have asked? **Kevin Weil** [35:16] Uh, well, I hope everybody tries Prism, right? It's, it's available today at prism.openai.com. It's totally free. You log in with your ChatGPT account, and you can go build anything you would like. ### Outro **RJ** [35:30] We're, we're really excited to see what people will use it for, and, um, if, if you run into issues or have any feedback, let us know. **Host** [35:35] I have a paper I'm gonna write on it- **RJ** [35:37] Really? **Host** [35:38] ... really soon on it. **RJ** [35:39] Amazing. **Kevin Weil** [35:39] Yeah. **RJ** [35:39] Yeah. **Host** [35:39] We'll put show notes in this thing. I don't, I don't know. Let's, let's see what it does in LaTeX. **Kevin Weil** [35:43] Yeah, totally. **Host** [35:44] Yeah. **Kevin Weil** [35:45] Congrats on your first OpenAI launch. **RJ** [35:46] Yeah. **Host** [35:46] There you go. **Kevin Weil** [35:47] Thank you. **RJ** [35:47] Congratulations. **Host** [35:48] Congrats. **Kevin Weil** [35:48] Yeah. **Host** [35:48] Well, thanks for having us. **Kevin Weil** [35:49] Yeah, thank you. --- This library is powered by PodHood (https://podhood.com), the podcast website platform.