Kevin Well, head of Science for Science, advanced the analogy himself. “I think 2026 will be to AI and science what 2025 was to AI in software engineering,” he said at a press briefing yesterday. “We’re starting to see similar efficiencies.”
Openei claims that about 1.3 million scientists worldwide submit more than 8 million questions a week to ChatGPT on cutting-edge topics in science and mathematics. “This tells us that AI is moving from a curiosity to a basic workflow for scientists,” Weil said.
Prism is a response to consumer behavior. It could also be seen as a bid to lock more scientists into Openai’s product in a market crowded with rival chatbots.
“I mostly use GPT5,” says Roland Dunbruck, a professor of biology at Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia, who is not affiliated with OpenAI. “Occasionally, I ask an LLMS a scientific question, mainly in the hope that it will lead to faster access to information in the literature.
Nikita Ziotovsky, a statistician at the University of California, Berkeley, says GPT5 has already become an important tool in his work. “It sometimes helps polish the text of papers, catches mathematical typos or bugs, and generally provides useful feedback.” “It’s extremely helpful for quick summaries of research articles, interacting with the scientific literature.”
By combining a chatbot with an everyday piece of software, Prism follows a trend set by products like OpenEye Atlas, which embeds chatput in a web browser, as well as LLM-powered office tools from firms like Microsoft and Google DeepMind.
Prism has added GPT-5.2, the company’s best model yet for mathematical and scientific problem solving, to an editor for writing documents in LaTeX, a common coding language used by scientists to format scientific papers.
A chat GPT chat box sits at the bottom of the screen, below which the article is being written. Scientists can call ChatGPT for anything they want. This can help them draft text, summarize related topics, manage their references, convert whiteboard scribble images into equations or diagrams, or talk through hypotheses or mathematical proofs.