OpenAI launches Prism, a new AI workspace for scientists

OpenAI on Tuesday launched a new scientific workspace program called prism It is available for free to anyone with a ChatGPT account. Prism is designed as an AI word processor and research tool for scientific papers, and is deeply integrated with GPT-5.2, which can be used to evaluate claims, review prose, or search for previous research.

Prism is not designed to conduct research alone and without human guidance. Executives believe it will speed up the work done by human scientists, and have compared Prism to programming interfaces like Cursor and Windsurf.

“I think 2026 will be the year for AI and science, as 2025 was for AI and software engineering,” Kevin Weil, OpenAI’s vice president of science, said on a press call announcing the tool.

The new software, which can be accessed via a web app, comes as OpenAI sees a torrent of scientific inquiries coming into its consumer products like ChatGPT. The company says ChatGPT receives an average of 8.4 million messages per week on advanced topics in the hard sciences — although it’s difficult to know how many come from professional researchers.

AI-powered research is also becoming more popular among academic researchers. In mathematics, artificial intelligence models have been used for proof A number of long-standing Erdos problems Through a combination of literature review and new applications of existing techniques. While the significance of the evidence is still hotly debated, the results were an early victory for proponents of AI models and formal verification systems.

Statistical paper published in December Use GPT 5.2 Pro to create new proofs of a central axiom of statistical theory, with only human researchers stimulating and verifying the model’s operation. OpenAI praised the result In a blog postAnd present it as a model for cooperation between humans and artificial intelligence in the field of future research.

“In fields with intuitive theoretical underpinnings, parametric models can help explore evidence, test hypotheses, and identify connections that would otherwise require significant human effort to uncover,” the publication says.

Much of the value of the new OpenAI system comes from the simple product working by current standards. Prism integrates with LaTeX, an open source system used for formatting and typesetting scientific papers, but it significantly outpaces most available LaTeX software tools. The software also takes advantage of GPT 5.2’s visual capabilities to allow researchers to compile charts from online whiteboard drawings, which can be a major weakness with existing tools.

Perhaps the most powerful feature comes from the combination of the usual powers of an AI model and more stringent context management. When users open a ChatGPT window through Prism, the model can access the full context of the research project, making responses more relevant and smarter.

Much of this will be possible for a skilled user of GPT-5.2, but OpenAI hopes the cleaner interface will attract scientific researchers more quickly. Weil described it as the same set of factors that have made AI tools so powerful in software engineering.

“Software engineering has accelerated partly because of amazing models, and partly because of deep workflow integration,” he told reporters.