Kevin Weil

⚡️ Prism: OpenAI's LaTeX "Cursor for Scientists" — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science

Jan 27, 2026 · 36:00

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…

Building AGI in Real Time (OpenAI Dev Day 2024)

Oct 4, 2024 · 2:09:35

OpenAI's DevDay 2024 unveils the Realtime API with WebSocket-based voice and function calling, Vision Finetuning, Prompt Caching, and Model Distillation. Product leads Olivier Godement, Romain Huet, and Michelle Pokrass detail design choices like zero-code caching and WebSockets for human-level latency. Alistair Pullen of Cosine explains how fine-tuning GPT-4o on custom reasoning traces beat o1 on SWE-bench Verified, while Sam Altman and Kevin Weil discuss AGI levels (o1 as level 2 reasoner), the coming agent era (level 3), safety through iterative deployment, and the importance of building for the frontier. The episode also covers moderation policy relaxation, plans for o1 system prompts by year-end, and the competitive admiration for NotebookLM.