News: 0180667170

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OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research (engadget.com)

(Tuesday January 27, 2026 @10:30PM (BeauHD) from the built-for-scientists dept.)


OpenAI has [1]launched Prism, a free scientific research app that [2]aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming . Engadget reports:

> Prism builds on [3]Crixet , a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, [4]LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific documents and journals. Nearly the entire scientific community relies on LaTeX, but it can make some tasks, such as drawing diagrams through TikZ commands, time-consuming to do. Beyond that, LaTeX is just one of the software tools a scientist might turn to when preparing to publish their research.

>

> That's where Prism comes into the picture. Like Crixet before it, the app offers robust LaTeX editing and a built-in AI assistant. Where previously it was Crixet's own Chirp agent, now it's GPT-5.2 Thinking. OpenAI's model can help with more than just formatting journals -- in a press demo, an OpenAI employee used it to find and incorporate scientific literature that was relevant to the paper they were working on, with GPT-5.2 automating the process of writing the bibliography. [...] Later in the same demo, the OpenAI employee used Prism to generate a lesson plan for a graduate course on general relativity, as well as a set of problems for students to solve. OpenAI envisions these features helping scientists and professors spend less time on the more tedious tasks in their professions.



[1] https://openai.com/prism/

[2] https://www.engadget.com/ai/openai-releases-prism-a-claude-code-like-app-for-scientific-research-180000454.html

[3] https://crixet.com/

[4] https://www.latex-project.org/



Finally! (Score:2)

by Charlotte ( 16886 )

Where was this all my life? This is actually something AI can do extremely well!

Re: Finally! (Score:3)

by Nick ( 109 )

Hello fellow low UID o.g.!

Re: (Score:2)

by Charlotte ( 16886 )

And first post, too. Here's to us keeping the dream alive :).

So it makes researchers 20% slower? (Score:2)

by gweihir ( 88907 )

Because that is what it essentially did for any real programming besides simplistic boilerplate: [1]https://mikelovesrobots.substa... [substack.com]

[1] https://mikelovesrobots.substack.com/p/wheres-the-shovelware-why-ai-coding

Re: (Score:3)

by test321 ( 8891681 )

I don't consider using but I can see the use case. "Convert this image to drawing commands" could be useful to some. A drawing in a paper won't need code structure or maintenance, so code maintainability is no concern. Also editing tables in latex is tedious and tricky, and is a table at which AI should excel (generating templates, reformatting).

Re: (Score:2)

by gweihir ( 88907 )

> Also editing tables in latex is tedious and tricky, and is a table at which AI should excel (generating templates, reformatting).

Not that tricky, really. If this thing is essentially just a LaTeX editor addon, it will not do much.

cloud based latex copy? (Score:2)

by Mr. Dollar Ton ( 5495648 )

Who needs it, CERN already pays for my unterleaf.

UNIX Shell is the Best Fourth Generation Programming Language

It is the UNIX shell that makes it possible to do applications in a small
fraction of the code and time it takes in third generation languages. In
the shell you process whole files at a time, instead of only a line at a
time. And, a line of code in the UNIX shell is one or more programs,
which do more than pages of instructions in a 3GL. Applications can be
developed in hours and days, rather than months and years with traditional
systems. Most of the other 4GLs available today look more like COBOL or
RPG, the most tedious of the third generation languages.

"UNIX Relational Database Management: Application Development in the UNIX
Environment" by Rod Manis, Evan Schaffer, and Robert Jorgensen. Prentice
Hall Software Series. Brian Kerrighan, Advisor. 1988.