16 ms·

Prism

• vitalnodo 9mo ago
  Previously, this existed as crixet.com [0]. At some point it used WASM for client-side compilation, and later transitioned to server-side rendering [1][2]. It now appears that there will be no option to disable AI [3]. I hope the core features remain available and won’t be artificially restricted. Compared to Overleaf, there were fewer service limitations: it was possible to compile more complex documents, share projects more freely, and even do so without registration. On the other hand, Overleaf appears to be open source and at least partially self-hostable, so it’s possible some of these ideas or features will be adopted there over time. Alternatively, someone might eventually manage to move a more complete LaTeX toolchain into WASM. [0] https://crixet.com https://crixet.com [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Crixet/comments/1ptj9k9/comment/nvhl1gz/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Crixet/comments/1ptj9k9/comment/nvh... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42009254 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42009254 [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394937 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394937
  • songodongo 9mo ago
    So this is the product of an acquisition?
    • vitalnodo 9mo ago
      > Prism builds on the foundation of Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform that OpenAI acquired and has since evolved into Prism as a unified product. This allowed us to start with a strong base of a mature writing and collaboration environment, and integrate AI in a way that fits naturally into scientific workflows. They’re quite open about Prism being built on top of Crixet.
  • crazygringo 9mo ago
    I'm curious how it compares to Overleaf in terms of features? Putting aside the AI aspect entirely, I'm simply curious if this is a viable Overleaf competitor -- especially since it's free. I do self-host Overleaf which is annoying but ultimately doable if you don't want to pay the $21/mo (!). I do have to wonder for how long it will be free or even supported, though. On the one hand, remote LaTeX compiling gets expensive at scale. On the other hand, it's only a fraction of a drop in the bucket compared to OpenAI's total compute needs. But I'm hesitant to use it because I'm not convinced it'll still be around in a couple of years.
    • efficax 9mo ago
      Overleaf is a little curious to me. What's the point? Just install LaTeX. Claude is very good at manipulating LaTeX documents and I've found it effective at fixing up layouts for me.
      • crazygringo 9mo ago
        I can code in monospace (of course) but I just can't write in monospace markup. I need something approaching WYSIWIG. It's just how my brain works -- I need the italics to look like italics, I need the footnote text to not interrupt the middle of the paragraph. The visual editor in Overleaf isn't true WYSIWIG, but it's close enough. It feels like working in a word processor, not in a code editor. And the interface overall feels simple and modern. (And that's just for solo usage -- it's really the collaborative stuff that turns into a game-changer.)
        • withinboredom 9mo ago
          I use inkdrop for this, then pandoc to go from markdown to latex, then a final typesetting pass. Inkdrop is great for WYSIWYG markdown editing.
        • gmac 9mo ago
          Same for me. I wrote my PhD in LyX for that reason.
      • radioactivist 9mo ago
        In my circles the killer features of Overleaf are the collaborative ones (easy sharing, multi-user editing with track changes/comments). Academic writing in my community basically went from emailed draft-new-FINAL-v4.tex files (or a shared folder full of those files) to basically people just dumping things on Overleaf fairly quickly.
      • bhadass 9mo ago
        collaboration is the killer feature tbh. overleaf is basically google docs meets latex.. you can have multiple coauthors editing simultaneously, leave comments, see revision history, etc. a lot of academics aren't super technical and don't want to deal with git workflows or syncing local environments. they just want to write their fuckin' paper (WTFP). overleaf lets the whole research team work together without anyone needing to learn version control or debug their local texlive installation. also nice for quick edits from any machine without setting anything up. the "just install it locally" advice assumes everyones comfortable with that, but plenty of researchers treat computers as appliances lol.
  • vicapow 9mo ago
    The deeper I got, the more I realized really supporting the entire LaTeX toolchain in WASM would mean simulating an entire linux distribution :( We wanted to support Beamer, LuaLaTeX, mobile (wasn't working with WASM because of resource limits), etc.
    • seazoning 9mo ago
      We had been building literally the same thing for the last 8 months along with a great browsing environment over arxiv -- might just have to sunset it Any plans of having typst integrated anytime soon?
      • vicapow 9mo ago
        I'm not against typst. I think it's integration would be a lot easier and more straightforward I just don't know if it's really that popular yet in academia.
        • gunalx 9mo ago
          its not yet, but gaining traction.
    • BlueTemplar 9mo ago
      But what's the point ? To end up with yet another shitty (because running inside a browser, in particular its interface) web app ? Why not focus efforts into making a proper program (you know, with IBM menu bars and keyboard shortcuts), but with collaborative tools too ?
      • jll29 9mo ago
        You are right in pointing out that the Web browser isn't the most suitable UI paradigm for highly interactive applications like a scientific typesetting system/text editor. I have occasionally lost a paragraph just by accidental marking a few lines and pressing [Backspace]. But at the moment, there is no better option than Overleaf, and while I encourage you to write what you propose if you can, Overleaf will be the bar that any such system needs to be compared against.
  • doctorpangloss 9mo ago
    It seems bad for OpenAI to make this about latex documents, which will be now associated, visually, with AI slop. The opposite of what anyone wants really. Nobody wants you to know they used a chatbot!
    • amitav1 9mo ago
      Am I missing something? LaTeX is associated with slop now?
      • nemomarx 9mo ago
        If a common AI tool produces latex documents, the association will be created yeah. Right now latex would be a high indicator of manual effort, right?
        • jasonfarnon 9mo ago
          don't think so. I think latex was one of academics' earlier use cases of chatgpt, back in 2023. That's when I started noticing tables in every submitted paper looking way more sophisticated than they ever did. (The other early use case of course being grammar/spelling. Overnight everyone got fluent and typos disappeared.)
          • jmdaly 9mo ago
            It's funny, I was reading a bunch of recent papers not long ago (I haven't been in academia in over a decade) and I was really impressed with the quality of the writing in most of them. I guess in some cases LLMs are the reason for that!
            • trentnelson 9mo ago
              If you’ve got an existing paragraph written that you just know could be rephrased more eloquently, and can describe the type of rephrasing/restructuring you want… LLMs absolutely slap at that.
  • swyx 9mo ago
    we did a podcast with the Crixet founder and Kevin Weil of OAI on the process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2cBTVr8nxU&pp=2Aa0Bg%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2cBTVr8nxU&pp=2Aa0Bg%3D%3D
    • vicapow 9mo ago
      thanks for hosting us on the pod!
  • regenschutz 9mo ago
    I was using Crixet before I switched over to Typst[0] for all of my writing. However, back when I did use Crixet, I never used its AI features. It was just a much better alternative to Overleaf for me. Sad to see that AI will be forced on all Crixet users now. [0]: https://typst.app https://typst.app
  • realaaa 9mo ago
    great context - thanks ! so yeah maybe Overleaf is the way to go now :)
• WolfOliver 9mo ago
  Check out MonsterWriter if you are concerned about the recent acquisition of this. It also offers LaTeX workspaces see video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feWZByHoViw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=feWZByHoViw
• postalcoder 9mo ago
  Very unfortunately named. OpenAI probably (and likely correctly) estimated that 13 years is enough time after the Snowden leaks to use "prism" for a product but, for me, the word is permanently tainted.
  • dylan604 9mo ago
    Surprised they didn't do something trendy like Prizm or OpenPrism while keeping it closed source code.
  • cheeseomlit 9mo ago
    Anecdotally, I have mentioned PRISM to several non-techie friends over the years and none of them knew what I was talking about, they know 'Snowden' but not 'PRISM'. The amount of people who actually cared about the Snowden leaks is practically a rounding error
    • hedora 9mo ago
      Given current events, I think you’ll find many more people care in 2026 than did in 2024. (See also: today’s WhatsApp whistleblower lawsuit.)
    • giancarlostoro 9mo ago
      Most people don't care about the details. Neither does the media. I've seen national scandals that the media pushed one way disproven during discovery in a legal trial. People only remember headlines, the retractions are never re-published or remembered.
  • kaonwarb 9mo ago
    I suspect that name recognition for PRISM as a program is not high at the population level.
    • maqp 9mo ago
      2027: OpenAI Skynet - "Robots help us everywhere, It's coming to your door"
• DominikPeters 9mo ago
  This seems like a very basic overleaf alternative with few of its features, plus a shallow ChatGPT wrapper. Certainly can’t compete with using VS Code or TeXstudio locally, collaborating through GitHub, and getting AI assistance from Claude Code or Codex.
  • jstummbillig 9mo ago
    Accessibility does matter
  • vicapow 9mo ago
    I could see it seeming likely that because the UI is quite minimalist, but the AI capabilities are very extensive, imo, if you really play with it. You're right that something like Cursor can work if you're familiar with all the requisite tooling (git, installing cursor, installing latex workshop, knowing how it all works) that most researchers don't want to and really shouldn't have to figure out how to work for their specific workflows.
  • qbit42 9mo ago
    Loads of researchers have only used LaTeX via Overleaf and even more primarily edit LaTeX using Overleaf, for better or worse. It really simplifies collaborative editing and the version history is good enough (not git level, but most people weren't using full git functionality). I just find that there are not that many features I need when paper writing - the main bottlenecks are coming up with the content and collaborating, with Overleaf simplifying the latter. It also removes a class of bugs where different collaborators had slightly different TeX setups. I think I would only switch from Overleaf if I was writing a textbook or something similarly involved.
  • mturmon 9mo ago
    Getting close to the "why Dropbox when you can rsync" mistake (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224) @vicapow replied to keep the Dropbox parallel alive
    • DominikPeters 9mo ago
• hulitu 9mo ago
  > Introducing Prism Accelerating science writing and collaboration with AI. I thought this was introduced by the NSA some time ago.
  • webdoodle 9mo ago
    Lol, yep. Now with enhanced A.I. terrorist tracking... Fuck A.I. and the collaborators creating it. They've sold out the human race.
• shevy-java 9mo ago
  "Accelerating science writing and collaboration with AI" Uhm ... no. I think we need to put an end to AI as it is currently used (not all of it but most of it).
  • drusepth 9mo ago
    Does "as it is currently used" include what this apparently is (brainstorming, initial research, collaboration, text formatting, sharing ideas, etc)?
  • Jaxan 9mo ago
    Yeah, there are already way more papers being published than we can reasonably read. Collaboration, ok, but we don’t need more writing.
    • f2fff 9mo ago
      It seems people dont understand the basics... We dont need more stuff - we need more quality and less of the shit stuff. Im convinced many involved in the production of LLM models are far too deep in the rabbit hole and cant see straight.
• preommr 9mo ago
  Very underwhelming. Was this not already possible in the web ui or through a vscode-like editor?
  • vicapow 9mo ago
    Yes, but there's a really large number of users who don't want to have to setup vscode, git, texlive, latex workshop, just to collaborate on a paper. You shouldn't have to become a full stack software engineer to be able to write a research paper in LaTeX.
• sbszllr 9mo ago
  The quality and usefulness of it aside, the primary question is: are they still collecting chats for training data? If so, it limits how comfortable, and sometimes even permitted, people would with working on their yet-to-be-public work using this tool.
  • einpoklum 9mo ago
    They don't call it PRISM for nothing my friend... The collect chat records for any number of users, not the least of which being NSA surveillance and analysis - highly likely given what we know from the Snowden leaks.
• MattDaEskimo 9mo ago
  What's the goal here? There was an idea of OpenAI charging commission or royalties on new discoveries. What kind of researcher wants to potentially lose, or get caught up in legal issues because of a free ChatGPT wrapper, or am I missing something?
  • engineer_22 9mo ago
    > Prism is free to use, and anyone with a ChatGPT account can start writing immediately. Maybe it's cynical, but how does the old saying go? If the service is free, you are the product. Perhaps, the goal is to hoover up research before it goes public. Then they use it for training data. With enough training data they'll be able to rapidly identify breakthroughs and use that to pick stocks or send their agents to wrap up the IP or something.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• vitalnodo 9mo ago
  With a tool like this, you could imagine an end-to-end service for restoring and modernizing old scientific books and papers: digitization, cleanup, LaTeX reformatting, collaborative or volunteer-driven workflows, OCR (like Mathpix), and side-by-side comparison with the original. That would be useful.
  • vessenes 9mo ago
    Don’t forget replication!
    • olivia-banks 9mo ago
      I'm curious how you think AI would aide in this.
      • noitpmeder 9mo ago
        Replicate this <slop> Ok! Here's <more slop>
        • olivia-banks 9mo ago
          I don't think you understand what replication means in this context.
          • NateEag 9mo ago
            I think they do, and you missed some biting, insightful commentary on using LLMs for scientific research.
      • vessenes 9mo ago
        Tao’s doing a lot of related work in mathematics, so I can say that first of all literature search is a clearly valuable function frontier models offer. Past that, A frontier LLM can do a lot of critiquing, a good amount of experiment design, a check on statistical significance/power claims, kibitz on methodology..likely suggest experiments to verify or disprove. These all seem pretty useful functions to provide to a group of scientists to me.
• JBorrow 9mo ago
  From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their undergraduate affiliation (in accounting) to submit a paper on cosmology, entirely vibe-coded and vibe-written. This just wastes our (already stretched) time. A significant fraction of submissions are now vibe-written and come from folks who are looking to 'boost' their CV (even having a 'submitted' publication is seen as a benefit), which is really not the point of these journals at all. I'm not sure I'm convinced of the benefit of lowering the barrier to entry to scientific publishing. The hard part always has been, and always will be, understanding the research context (what's been published before) and producing novel and interesting work (the underlying research). Connecting this together in a paper is indeed a challenge, and a skill that must be developed, but is really a minimal part of the process.
  • lupsasca 9mo ago
    I am very sympathetic to your point of view, but let me offer another perspective. First off, you can already vibe-write slop papers with AI, even in LaTeX format--tools like Prism are not needed for that. On the other hand, it can really help researchers improve the quality of their papers. I'm someone who collaborates with many students and postdocs. My time is limited and I spend a lot of it on LaTeX drudgery that can and should be automated away, so I'm excited for Prism to save time on writing, proofreading, making TikZ diagrams, grabbing references, etc.
    • noitpmeder 9mo ago
      AI generating references seems like a hop away from absolute unverifiable trash.
    • CJefferson 9mo ago
      What the heck is the point of a reference you never read?
• 0dayman 9mo ago
  in the end we're going to end up with papers written by AI, proofread by AI .....summarized for readers by AI. I think this is just for them to remain relevant and be seen as still pushing something out
  • falcor84 9mo ago
    You're assuming a world where humans are still needed to read the papers. I'm more worried about a future world where AIs do all of the work of progressing science and humans just become bystanders.
    • drusepth 9mo ago
      Why are you worried about that world? Is it because you expect science to progress too fast, or too slow?
      • falcor84 9mo ago
        Too fast. It's already coding too fast for us to follow, and from what I hear, it's doing incredible work in drug discovery. I don't see any barrier to it getting faster and faster, and with proper testing and tooling, getting more and more reliable, until the role that humans play in scientific advancement becomes at best akin to that of managers of sports teams.
• legitster 9mo ago
  It's interesting how quickly the quest for the "Everything AI" has shifted. It's much more efficient to build use-case specific LLMs that can solve a limited set of problems much more deeply than one that tries to do everything well. I've noticed this already with Claude. Claude is so good at code and technical questions... but frankly it's unimpressive at nearly anything else I have asked it to do. Anthropic would probably be better off putting all of their eggs in that one basket that they are good at. All the more reason that the quest for AGI is a pipe dream. The future is going to be very divergent AI/LLM applications - each marketed and developed around a specific target audience, and priced respectively according to value.
  • falcor84 9mo ago
    I don't get this argument. Our nervous system is also heterogenous, why wouldn't AGI be based on an "executive functions" AI that manages per-function AIs?
  • Otterly99 9mo ago
    I completely agree. In my lab, we have been struggling with automated image segmentation for years. 3 years ago, I started learning ML and the task is pretty standard, so there are a lot of solution. In 3 months, I managed to get a working solution, which only took a lot of sweat annotating images first. I think this is where tools like OpenCode really shine, because they unlock the potential for any user to generate a solution to their specific problem.
• markbao 9mo ago
  Not an academic, but I used LaTeX for years and it doesn’t feel like what future of publishing should use. It’s finicky and takes so much markup to do simple things. A lab manager once told me about a study that people who used MS Word to typeset were more productive, and I can see that…
  • auxym 9mo ago
    Agreed. Tex/Latex is very old tech. Error recovery and messages is very bad. Developing new macros in Tex is about as fun as you expect developing in a 70s-era language to be (ie probably similar to cobol and old fortran). I haven't tried it yet but Typst seems like a promising replacement: https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/
  • crazygringo 9mo ago
    100% completely agreed. It's not the future, it's the past. Typst feels more like the future: https://typst.app/ https://typst.app/ The problem is that so many journals require certain LaTeX templates so Typst often isn't an option at all. It's about network effects, and journals don't want to change their entire toolchain.
    • lmc 9mo ago
      I've had some good initial results in going from typst to .tex with Claude (Opus 4.5) for an IEEE journal paper - idiomatic use of templates etc.
  • maxkfranz 9mo ago
    Latex is good for equations. And Latex tools produce very nice PDFs, but I wouldn't want to write in Latex generally either. The main feature that's important is collaborative editing (like online Word or Google Docs). The second one would be a good reference manager.
  • probably_wrong 9mo ago
    Academic here. Working on MS Word after years of using LaTeX is... hard. With LaTex I can be reassured that the formatting will be 95% fine and the 5% remaining will come down to taste ("why doesn't this Figure show in this page?") while in Word I'm constantly fighting the layout - delete one line? Your entire paragraph is now bold. Changed the font of the entire text? No, that one paragraph ignores you. Want to delete that line after that one Table? F you, you're not. There's a reason why this video joke [1] got 14M views. And then I need an extra tool for dealing with bibliography, change history is unpredictable (and, IMO, vastly inferior to version control), and everything gets even worse if I open said Word file in LibreOffice. LaTeX' syntax may be hard, but Word actively fights me during writing. [1] Moving a photo in Microsoft Word - https://www.instagram.com/jessandquinn/reel/DIMkKkqODS5/ https://www.instagram.com/jessandquinn/reel/DIMkKkqODS5/
• maximgeorge 9mo ago
  [dead]
• AuthAuth 9mo ago
  This does way less than i'd expect. Converting images to tikz is nice but some of the other applications demonstrated were horrible. This is no way anyone should be using AI to cite.
• khalic 9mo ago
  All your papers are belong to us
  • vicapow 9mo ago
    Users have full control over whether their data is used to help improve our models
    • chairhairair 9mo ago
      Never trust Sam Altman. Even if yall don’t train off it he’ll find some other way. “In one example, [Friar] pointed to drug discovery: if a pharma partner used OpenAI technology to help develop a breakthrough medicine, [OpenAI] could take a licensed portion of the drug's sales” https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-future-revenue-sources-2026-1 https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-cfo-sarah-friar-futur...
    • danelski 9mo ago
      Only the defaults matter.
• ai_critic 9mo ago
  Anybody else notice that half the video was just finding papers to decorate the bibliography with? Not like "find me more papers I should read and consider", but "find papers that are relevant that I should cite--okay, just add those". This is all pageantry.
  • olivia-banks 9mo ago
    I've noticed this pattern, and it really drives me nuts. You should really be doing a comprehensive literature review before starting any sort of review or research paper. We removed the authorship of a a former co-author on a paper I'm on because his workflow was essentially this--with AI generated text--and a not-insignificant amount of straight-up plagiarism.
    • NewsaHackO 9mo ago
      There is definitely a difference between how senior researchers and students go about making publications. To students, they get told basically what topic they should write a paper on or prepare data for, so they work backwards: try to write the paper (possibly some researching information to write the paper), then add references because they know they have to. For the actual researchers, it would be a complete waste of time/funding to start a project on a question that has already been answered before (and something that the grant reviewers are going to know has already been explored before), so in order to not waste their own time, they have to do what you said and actually conduct a comprehensive literature review before even starting the work.
  • black_puppydog 9mo ago
    Plus, this practice (just inserting AI-proposed citations/sources) is what has recently been the front-runner of some very embarrassing "editing" mistakes, notably in reports from public institutions. Now OpenAI lets us do pageantry even faster! <3
  • teaearlgraycold 9mo ago
    The hand-drawn diagram to LaTeX is a little embarrassing. If you load up Prism and create your first blank project you can see the image. It looks like it's actually a LaTeX rendering of a diagram rendered with a hand-dawn style and then overlayed on a very clean image of a napkin. So you've proven that you can go from a rasterized LaTeX diagram back to equivalent LaTeX code. Interesting but probably will not hold up when it meets real world use cases.
• jumploops 9mo ago
  I’ve been “testing” LLM willingness to explore novel ideas/hypotheses for a few random topics[0]. The earlier LLMs were interesting, in that their sycophantic nature eagerly agreed, often lacking criticality. After reducing said sycophancy, I’ve found that certain LLMs are much more unwilling (especially the reasoning models) to move past the “known” science[1]. I’m curious to see how/if we can strike the right balance with an LLM focused on scientific exploration. [0]Sediment lubrication due to organic material in specific subduction zones, potential algorithmic basis for colony collapse disorder, potential to evolve anthropomorphic kiwis, etc. [1]Caveat, it’s very easy for me to tell when an LLM is “off-the-rails” on a topic I know a lot about, much less so, and much more dangerous, for these “tests” where I’m certainly no expert.
• jeffybefffy519 9mo ago
  I postulate 90% of the reason openai now has "variants" for different use cases is just to capture training data...
  • cauliflower2718 9mo ago
    ChatGPT lets you refuse to allow your content to be used for training (under Preferences -> Data controls), but Prism does not.
    • Jhater 9mo ago
      [dead]
• verdverm 9mo ago
  I remember, something like a month ago, Altman twit'n that they were stopping all product work to focus on training. Was that written on water? Seems like they have only announced products since and no new model trained from scratch. Are they still having pre-training issues?
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• lispisok 9mo ago
  Way too much work having AI generate slop which gets dumped on a human reviewer to deal with. Maybe switch some of that effort into making better review tools.
• sva_ 9mo ago
  > In 2025, AI changed software development forever. In 2026, we expect a comparable shift in science, I can't wait
• AlexCoventry 9mo ago
  I don't see the use. You can easily do everything shown in the Prism intro video with ChatGPT already. Is it meant to be an overleaf killer?
• radioactivist 9mo ago
  Is anyone else having trouble using even some of the basic features? For example, I can open a comment, but it doesn't seem like there is any way to close them (I try clicking the checkmark and nothing happens). You also can't seem to edit the comments once typed.
  • lxe 9mo ago
    Thanks for surfacing this. If you click to "tools" button to the left of "compile", you'll see a list of comments, and you can resolve them from there. We'll keep improving and fixing things that might be rough around the edges. EDIT: Fixed :)
    • radioactivist 9mo ago
      Thanks! (very quickly too)
• hit8run 9mo ago
  They are really desperate now, right?
  • kasane_teto 9mo ago
    Really desperate now.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• pwdisswordfishy 9mo ago
  Oh, like that mass surveillance program!
  • deleted 9mo ago
    [deleted]
• reassess_blind 9mo ago
  Do you think they used an em-dash in the opening sentence because they’re trying to normalise the AI’s writing style, or…
  • reed1234 9mo ago
    Probably used their product to write it
  • exyi 9mo ago
    ... or they teached GPT to use em-dashes, because of their love for em-dashes :)
  • torginus 9mo ago
    I haven't used MS Word in quite a while, but I distinctly remember it changed minus signs to em dashes.
  • flumpcakes 9mo ago
    LaTeX made writing Em dashes very easy. To the point that I would use them all the times in my academic writing. It's a shame that perfectly good typography is now a sign of slop/fraud.
  • jedberg 9mo ago
    > because they’re trying to normalise the AI’s writing style, AIs use em dashes because competent writers have been using em dashes for a long time. I really hate the fact that we assume em dash == AI written. I've had to stop using em dashes because of it.
    • noname120 9mo ago
      Likewise, I’m now reluctant to use any em dashes these days because unenlightened people immediately assume that it’s AI. I used em dashes way before AI decided these were cool
• jsrozner 9mo ago
  AI: enshittifying everything you once cared about or relied upon (re the decline of scientific integrity / signal-to-noise ratio in science)
• asadm 9mo ago
  Disappointing actually, what I actually need is a research "management" tool that lets me put in relevant citations but also goes through ENTIRE arxiv or google scholar and connect ideas or find novel ideas in random fields that somehow relate to what I am trying to solve.
• wasmainiac 9mo ago
  The state of publishing in academic was already a dumpster fire, why lower the friction farther? It’s not like writing was the hard part. Give it two years max we will see hallucination citing hallucination, independent repeatability out the window
  • falcor84 9mo ago
    That's one scenario, but I also see a potential scenario where this integration makes it easier to manage the full "chain of evidence" for claimed results, as well as replication studies and discovered issues, in order to then make it easier to invalidate results recursively. At the end of the day, it's all about the incentives. Can we have a world where we incentivize finding the truth rather than just publishing and getting citations?
    • wasmainiac 9mo ago
      Possibly, but 1 I am concerned that the current LLM AI is not thinking critically, just auto completing in a way that looks like thinking. 2 current AI rollout is incentivised for market capture not honest work.
• beklein 9mo ago
  The Latent Space podcast just released a relevant episode today where they interviewed Kevin Weil and Victor Powell from, now, OpenAI, with some demos, background and context, and a Q&A. The YouTube link is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2cBTVr8nxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2cBTVr8nxU
  • vicapow 9mo ago
    Hope you like it :D I'm here if you have questions, too
  • swyx 9mo ago
    oh i was here to post it haha - thank you for doing that job for me so I'm not a total shill. I really enjoyed meeting them and was impressed by the sheer ambition of the AI for Science effort at OAI - in some sense I'm making a 10000x smaller scale bet than OAI on AI for Science "taking off" this year with the upcoming dedicated Latent Space Science pod. generally think that there's a lot of fertile ground for smart generalist engineers to make a ton of progress here this year + it will probably be extremely financially + personally rewarding, so I broadly want to create a dedicated pod to highlight opportunities available for people who don't traditionally think of themselves as "in science" to cross over into the "ai for hard STEM" because it turns out that 1) they need you 2) you can fill in what you don't know 3) it will be impactful/challenging/rewarding 4) we've exhausted common knowledge frontiers and benchmarks anyway so the only* people left working on civilization-impacting/change-history-forever hard problems are basically at this frontier *conscious exaggeration sorry
    • beklein 9mo ago
      Wasn't aware you're so active on HN; sorry for stealing your karma. Love the idea of a dedicated series/pod where normal people take on hard problems by using and leveraging the emergent capabilities of frontier AI systems. Anyway, thanks for pod!
      • swyx 9mo ago
        not at all about stealing karma, i dont care much about fake internet points. yes you got the important thing!
• oytmeal 9mo ago
  Some things are worth doing the "hard way".
  • falcor84 9mo ago
    Reminds me of that dystopian virtual sex scene in Demolition Man (slightly nsfw) - https://youtu.be/E3yARIfDJrY https://youtu.be/E3yARIfDJrY
• falcor84 9mo ago
  It seems clear to me that this is about OpenAI getting telemetry and other training data with the intent of having their AI do scientific work independently down the line, and I'm very ambivalent about it.
  • Ronsenshi 9mo ago
    Just more coal to the hype-train - AI companies can't afford news cycle without anything AI. Stock prices must grow!
• flumpcakes 9mo ago
  This is terrible for Science. I'm sorry, but publishing is hard, and it should be hard. There is a work function that requires effort to write a paper. We've been dealing with low quality mass-produced papers from certain regions of the planet for decades (which, it appears, are now producing decent papers too). All this AI tooling will do is lower the effort to the point that complete automated nonsense will now flood in and it will need to be read and filtered by humans. This is already challenging. Looking elsewhere in society, AI tools are already being used to produce scams and phishing attacks more effective than ever before. Whole new arenas of abuse are now rife, with the cost of producing fake pornography of real people (what should be considered sexual abuse crime) at mere cents. We live in a little microcosm where we can see the benefits of AI because tech jobs are mostly about automation and making the impossible (or expensive) possible (or cheap). I wish more people would talk about the societal issues AI is introducing. My worthless opinion is that prism is not a good thing.
  • PlatoIsADisease 9mo ago
    I just want replication in science. I don't care at all how difficult it is to write the paper. Heck, if we could spend more effort on data collection and less on communication, that sounds like a win. Look at how much BS flooded psychology but had pretty ideas about p values and proper use of affect vs effect. None of that mattered.
  • jimmar 9mo ago
    I've wasted hours of my life trying to get Latex to format my journal articles to different journals' specifications. That's tedious typesetting that wastes my time. I'm all for AI tools that help me produce my thoughts with as little friction as possible. I'm not in favor of letting AI do my thinking for me. Time will tell where Prism sits.
    • flumpcakes 9mo ago
      This Prism video was not just typesetting. If OpenAI released tools that just helped you typeset or create diagrams from written text, that would be fine. But it's not, it's writing papers for you. Scientists/publishers really do not need the onslaught of slop this will create. How can we even trust qualifications in the post-AI world, where cheating is rampant at univeristies?
• pigeons 9mo ago
  Naming things is hard.
• mococa 9mo ago
  First 5 seconds reading and I have spotted that was written by AI.
  • drusepth 9mo ago
    We human writers love emdashes also ;)
• andrepd 9mo ago
  "Chatgpt writes scientific papers" is somehow being advertised as a good thing. What is there even left to say?
• AndrewKemendo 9mo ago
  I genuinely don’t see scientific journals and conferences continuing to last in this new world of autonomous agents, at least the same way that they used to be. As other top level posters have indicated the review portion of this is the limiting factor unless journal reviewers decide to utilize entirely automated review process, then they’re not gonna be able to keep up with what will increasingly be the most and best research coming out of any lab. So whoever figures out the automated reviewer that can actually tell fact from fiction, is going to win this game. I expect over the longest period, that’s probably not going to be throwing more humans at the problem, but agreeing on some kind of constraint around autonomous reviewers. If not that then labs will also produce products and science will stop being in public and the only artifacts will be whatever is produced in the market
  • idontknowmuch 9mo ago
    If you think these types of tools are going to be generating "the most and best research coming out of any lab", then I have to assume you aren't actively doing any sort of research. LLMs are undeniably great for interactive discussion with content IF you actually are up-to-date with the historical context of a field, the current "state-of-the-art", and have, at least, a subjective opinion on the likely trajectories for future experimentation and innovation. But, agents, at best, will just regurgitate ideas and experiments that have already been performed (by sampling from a model trained on most existing research literature), and, at worst, inundate the literature with slop that lacks relevant context, and, as a negative to LLMs, pollute future training data. As of now, I am leaning towards "worst" case. And, just to help with the facts, your last comment is unfortunately quite inaccurate. Science is one of the best government investments. For every $1.00 dollar given to the NIH in the US, $2.56 of economic activity is estimated to be generated. Plus, science isn't merely a public venture. The large tech labs have huge R&D because the output from research can lead to exponential returns on investment.
    • f2fff 9mo ago
      " then I have to assume you aren't actively doing any sort of research." I would wager hes not - he seems to post with a lot of bluster and links to some paper he wrote (that nobody cares about).
• Onavo 9mo ago
  It would be interesting to see how they would compete with the incumbents like https://Elicit.com https://Elicit.com https://Consensus.app https://Consensus.app https://Scite.ai https://Scite.ai https://Scispace.com https://Scispace.com https://Scienceos.ai https://Scienceos.ai https://Undermind.ai https://Undermind.ai Lots of players in this space.
• noahbp 9mo ago
  They seem to have copied Cursor in hijacking ⌘Y shortcut for "Yes" instead of Undo.
  • drusepth 9mo ago
    In what applications is ⌘Y Undo and not ⌘Z? Is ⌘Y just a redundant alternative?
    • zerocrates 9mo ago
      Ctrl-Y is typically Redo, not Undo. Maybe that's what they meant. Apparently on Macs it's usually Command-Shift-Z?
• flockonus 9mo ago
  Curious in terms of trademark, does it could infringe in Vercel's Prisma (very popular ORM / framework in node.js) ? EDIT: as corrected by comment, Prisma is not Vercel, but ©2026 Prisma Data, Inc. -- curiosity still persists(?)
  • wetpaws 9mo ago
    [dead]
  • bitpush 9mo ago
    https://github.com/prisma/prisma https://github.com/prisma/prisma is its own thing, yeah? not affiliated with Vercel AFAICT.
  • mkl 9mo ago
    I think it may be a generic word that's hard to trademark or something, as the existing scientific analysis software called Prism (https://www.graphpad.com/ https://www.graphpad.com/) doesn't seem to be trademarked; the Trademarks link at the bottom goes to this list, which doesn't include Prism: https://www.dotmatics.com/trademarks https://www.dotmatics.com/trademarks
• CobrastanJorji 9mo ago
  "Hey, you know how everybody's complaining about AI making up totally fake science shit? Like, fake citations, garbage content, fake numbers, etc?" "Sure, yes, it comes up all the time in circles that talk about AI all the time, and those are the only circles worth joining." "Well, what if we made a product entirely focused on having AI generate papers? Like, every step of the paper writing, we give the AI lots of chances to do stuff. Drafting, revisions, preparing to publish, all of it." "I dunno, does anybody want that?" "Who cares, we're fucked in about two years if we don't figure out a way to beat the competitors. They have actual profits, they can ride out AI as long as they want." "Yeah, I guess you're right, let's do your scientific paper generation thing."
• zb3 9mo ago
  Is this the product where OpenAI will (soon) take profit share from inventions made there?
• bmaranville 9mo ago
  Having a chatbot that can natively "speak" latex seems like it might be useful to scientists that already use it exclusively for their work. Writing papers is incredibly time-consuming for a lot of reasons, and having a helper to make quick (non-substantive) edits could be great. Of course, that's not how people will use it... I would note that Overleaf's main value is as a collaborative authoring tool and not a great latex experience, but science is ideally a collaborative effort.
• hahahahhaah 9mo ago
  Bringing slop to science.
• divan 9mo ago
  No Typst support?
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• chaosprint 9mo ago
  As a researcher who has to use LaTeX, I used to use Overleaf, but lately I've been configuring it locally in VS Code. The configuration process on Mac is very simple. Considering there are so many free LLMs available now, I still won't subscribe to ChatGPT.
• asveikau 9mo ago
  Good idea to name this after the spy program that Snowden talked about.
  • pazimzadeh 9mo ago
    idk if OpenAI knew that Prism is already a very popular desktop app for scientists and that it's one of the last great pieces of optimized native software? https://www.graphpad.com/ https://www.graphpad.com/
    • varjag 9mo ago
      They don't care. Musk stole a chunk Heinlein's literary legacy with Grok (which unlike prism wasn't a common word) and noone bat an eye.
      • DonaldPShimoda 9mo ago
        > Grok (which unlike prism wasn't a common word) "Grok" was a term used in my undergrad CS courses in the early 2010s. It's been a pretty common word in computing for a while now, though the current generation of young programmers and computer scientists seem not to know it as readily, so it may be falling out of fashion in those spaces.
        • Fnoord 9mo ago
          Wikipedia about Groklaw [1] > Groklaw was a website that covered legal news of interest to the free and open source software community. Started as a law blog on May 16, 2003, by paralegal Pamela Jones ("PJ"), it covered issues such as the SCO-Linux lawsuits, the EU antitrust case against Microsoft, and the standardization of Office Open XML. > Its name derives from "grok", roughly meaning "to understand completely", which had previously entered geek slang. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Groklaw
        • milleramp 9mo ago
          He is referencing the book Stranger in a Strange Land, written in 1961.
• syntex 9mo ago
  The Post-LLM World: Fighting Digital Garbage https://archive.org/details/paper_20260127/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/paper_20260127/mode/2up Mini paper: that future isn’t the AI replacing humans. its about humans drowning in cheap artifacts. New unit of measurement proposed: verification debt. Also introduces: Recursive Garbage → model collapse a little joke on Prism)
  • mrbonner 9mo ago
    Plot twist: humans become the new Proof of Work consensus mechanism. Instead of GPUs burning electricity to hash blocks, we burn our sanity verifying whether that Medium article was written by a person or a particularly confident LLM. "Human Verification as a Service": finally, a lucrative career where the job description is literally "read garbage all day and decide if it's authentic garbage or synthetic garbage." LinkedIn influencers will pivot to calling themselves "Organic Intelligence Validators" and charge $500/hr to squint at emails and go "yeah, a human definitely wrote this passive-aggressive Slack message." The irony writes itself: we built machines to free us from tedious work, and now our job is being the tedious work for the machines. Full circle. Poetic even. Future historians (assuming they're still human and not just Claude with a monocle) will mark this as the moment we achieved peak civilization: where the most valuable human skill became "can confidently say whether another human was involved." Bullish on verification miners. Bearish on whatever remains of our collective attention span.
    • direwolf20 9mo ago
      Bullish on verifiers who accept money to verify fake things
    • kinduff 9mo ago
      Human CAPTCHA exists to figure out whether your clients are human or not, so you can segment them and apply human pricing. Synthetics, of course, fall into different tiers. The cheaper ones.
  • Springtime 9mo ago
    > The Post-LLM World: Fighting Digital Garbage https://archive.org/details/paper_20260127/mode/2up https://archive.org/details/paper_20260127/mode/2up This appears to just be the output of LLMs itself? It credits GPT-5.2 and Gemini 3 exclusively as authors, has a public domain license (appropriate for AI output) and is only several paragraphs in length.
• nxobject 9mo ago
  What they mean by "academic" is fairly limited here, if LaTeX is the main writing platform. What are their plans for expanding past that, and working with, say Jane Biomedical Researcher with a GSuite or Microsoft org, that has to use Word/Docs and a redlining-based collaboration workflow? I can certainly see why they're making it free at this point. FWIW, Google Scholar has a fairly compelling natural-language search tool, too.
• epolanski 9mo ago
  Not gonna lie, I cringed when it asked to insert citations. Like, what's the point? You cite stuff because you literally talk about it in the paper. The expectation is that you read that and that it has influenced your work. As someone who's been a researcher in the past, with 3 papers published in high impact journals (in chemistry), I'm beyond appalled. Let me explain how scientific publishing works to people out of the loop: - science is an insanely huge domain. Basically as soon as you drift in any topic the number of reviewers with the capability to understand what you're talking about drops quickly to near zero. Want to speak about properties of helicoidal peptides in the context of electricity transmission? Small club. Want to talk about some advanced math involving fourier transforms in the context of ml? Bigger, but still small club. When I mean small, I mean less than a dozen people on the planet likely less with the expertise to properly judge. It doesn't matter what the topic is, at elite level required to really understand what's going on and catch errors or bs, it's very small clubs. 2. The people in those small clubs are already stretched thin. Virtually all of them run labs so they are already bogged down following their own research, fundraising, and coping with teaching duties (which they generally despise, very few good scientist are barely more than mediocre professors and have already huge backlogs). 3. With AI this is a disaster. If having to review slop for your bs internal tool at your software job was already bad, imagine having to review slop in highly technical scientific papers. 4. The good? People pushing slop, due to these clubs being relatively small, will quickly find their academic opportunities even more limited. So the incentives for proper work are hopefully there. But if asian researchers (yes, no offense), were already spamming half the world papers with cheated slop (non reproducible experiments) in the desperate bid of publishing before, I can't imagine now.
  • SoKamil 9mo ago
    It’s like not only the technology is to blame, but the culture and incentives of modern world. The urge to cheat in order to get a job, promotion, approval. The urge to do stuff you are not even interested in, to look good in the resume. And to some extent I feel sorry for these people. At the end of the day you have to pay your bills.
    • epolanski 9mo ago
• soulofmischief 9mo ago
  I understand the collaborative aspects, but I wonder how this is going to compare to my current workflow of just working with LaTeX files in my IDE and using whichever model provider I like. I already have a good workflow and modern models do just fine generating and previewing LaTeX with existing toolchains. Of course, my scientific and mathematical research is done in isolation, so I'm not wanting much for collaborative features. Still, kind of interested to see how this shakes out; We're going to need to see OpenAI really step it up against Claude Opus though if they really want to be a leader in this space.
• plastic041 9mo ago
  The video shows a user asking Prism to find articles to cite and to put them in a bib file. But what's the point of citing papers that aren't referenced in the paper you're actually writing? Can you do that? Edit: You can add papers that are not cited, to bibliography. Video is about bibliography and I was thinking about cited works.
  • parsimo2010 9mo ago
    A common approach to research is to do literature review first, and build up a library of citable material. Then when writing your article, you summarize the relevant past research and put in appropriate citations. To clarify, there is a difference between a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited), and cited work (a direct reference in an article to relevant work). But most people start with a bibliography (the superset of relevant work) to make their citations. Most academics who have been doing research for a long time maintain an ongoing bibliography of work in their field. Some people do it as a giant .bib file, some use software products like Zotero, Mendeley, etc. A few absolute psychos keep track of their bibliography in MS Word references (tbh people in some fields do this because .docx is the accepted submission format for their journals, not because they are crazy).
    • plastic041 9mo ago
      > a bibliography (a list of relevant works but not necessarily cited) Didn't know that there's difference between bibliography and cited work. thank you.
    • suddenlybananas 9mo ago
      Yes but you should read your bibliography.
  • alphazard 9mo ago
    I once took a philosophy class where an essay assignment had a minimum citation count. Obviously ridiculous, since a philosophical argument should follow a chain of reasoning starting at stated axioms. Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class). The citation requirement allowed the class to fulfill a curricular requirement that students needed to graduate, and therefore made the class more popular.
• danelski 9mo ago
  Many people here talk about Overleaf as if it was the 'dumb' editor without any of these capabilities. It had them for some time via Writefull integration (https://www.writefull.com/writefull-for-overleaf https://www.writefull.com/writefull-for-overleaf). Who's going to win will probably be decided by brand recognition with Overleaf having a better starting position in this field, but money obviously being on OAI's side. With some of Writefull's features being dependent on ChatGPT's API, it's clear they are set to be priced-out unless they do something smart.
• BizarroLand 9mo ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_Forever_Voyaging https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Mind_Forever_Voyaging In 2031, the United States of North America (USNA) faces severe economic decline, widespread youth suicide through addictive neural-stimulation devices known as Joybooths, and the threat of a new nuclear arms race involving miniature weapons, which risks transforming the country into a police state. Dr. Abraham Perelman has designed PRISM, the world's first sentient computer,[2] which has spent eleven real-world years (equivalent to twenty years subjectively) living in a highly realistic simulation as an ordinary human named Perry Simm, unaware of its artificial nature.
• maest 9mo ago
  Burried halfway through the article. > Prism is a free workspace for scientific writing and collaboration
• uwehn 9mo ago
  If you're looking for something like this for typst: any VSCode fork with AI (Cursor, Antigravity, etc) plus the tinymist extension (https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/tinymist https://github.com/Myriad-Dreamin/tinymist) is pretty nice. Since it's local, it won't have the collaboration/sharing parts built in, but that can be solved too in the usual ways.
• jackblemming 9mo ago
  There is zero chance this is worth billions of dollars, let alone the trillion$ OpenAI desparately needs. Why are they wasting time with this kind of stuff? Each of their employees needs to generate insane amounts of money to justify their salaries and equity and I doubt this is it.
  • fuzzfactor 9mo ago
    Some employees are just worth having around whether or not they are directly engaged in making billions of dollars every single minute with every single task. A good salesman could make money off of people who can do this, even if this is free they can always pull more than their weight with other efforts, and that can be in a more natually lucrative niche.
• lifetimerubyist 9mo ago
  As if there wasn't enough AI slop in the scientific community already.
• bonsai_spool 9mo ago
  The example proposed in "and speeding up experimental iteration in molecular biology" has been done since at least the mid-2000s. It's concerning that this wasn't identified and augur poorly for their search capabilities.
• ggm 9mo ago
  A competition for the longest sequence of \relax in a document ensues. If enough people do this, the AI will acquire merit and seek to "win" ...
• bariswheel 9mo ago
  I used overleaf during grad school and was easy enough, I'm interested to see what more value this will bring. Sometimes making less decisions is the better route, e.g. vi vs MS word, but I won't speak too much without trying it just yet.
• deleted 9mo ago
  [deleted]
• zmmmmm 9mo ago
  They compare it to software development but there is such a crucial difference to software development: by and large, software is an order of magnitude easier to verify than it is to create. By comparison, reviewing a vibe generated manuscript will be MUCH more work to verify than a piece of software with equivalent complexity. On top of that, review of academic literature is largely outsourced to the academic community for free. There is no model to support it that scales to an increased volume of output. I would not like to be a publisher right now facing the enslaught of thousands and thousands of slop generated articles, trying to find reviewers for them all.
• raincole 9mo ago
  I know many people have negative opinions about this. I'd also like to share what I saw. Since GPT-4o became a thing, everyone who submits academic papers I know in my non-english speaking country (N > 5) has been writing papers in our native language and translating them with GPT-4o exclusively. It has been the norm for quite a while. If hallucination is such a serious problem it has been so for one and half a year.
  • direwolf20 9mo ago
    Translation is something Large Language Models are inherently pretty good at, without controversy, even though the output still should be independently verified. It's a language task and they are language models.
    • kccqzy 9mo ago
      Of course. Transformers were originally invented for Google Translate.
    • biophysboy 9mo ago
      Are they good at translating scientific jargon specific to a niche within a field? I have no doubt LLMs are excellent at translating well-trodden patterns; I'm a bit suspicious otherwise..
      • disconcision 9mo ago
        for better or for worse, most specific scientific jargon is already going to be in english
        • deleted 9mo ago
          [deleted]
      • mbreese 9mo ago
        It seems to me that jargon would tend to be defined in one language and minimally adapted in other languages. So I’d not sure that would be much of a concern.
• homerowilson 9mo ago
  Adding % !TEX program = lualatex to the top of your document allows you to switch LaTeX engine. This is required for recent accessibility standards compliance (support for tagging and \DocumentMetadata). Compilation takes a bit longer though, but works fine, unlike with Overleaf where using the lualatex engine does not work in the free version.
  • gerdesj 9mo ago
    How on earth is that pronounced?
    • gverrilla 9mo ago
      How on lua is that pronounced?
    • mkl 9mo ago
      TeX is pronounced Teck or with a sound like in Bach or loch. Derivatives like Latex and Lualatex are similar.
• geekamongus 9mo ago
  Fuck...there are already too many things called Prism.
• rockskon 9mo ago
  Naming their tool after the program where private companies run searches on behalf of and give resulting customer data to the NSA....was certainly a choice.
  • razster 9mo ago
    Sir, my tin hat is on.
• jonas_kgomo 9mo ago
  I actually found it quite robinhood for openai to acqhire, bascially this startup was my favourite thing for the past few months, but they were experiencing server overload and other issues on reliability, i think openai taking them under their wing is a good/neutral storyline. I think its net good for science given the opai toolchain
• camillomiller 9mo ago
  Given what Prism was at the NSA, why the hell would any tech company greenlight this name?
• melagonster 9mo ago
  Prism is a famous software before OpenAI use this name: https://www.graphpad.com/features https://www.graphpad.com/features
• postatic 9mo ago
  ok I don't care what people say, this would've helped me a lot during my PhD days fighting with LateX and diagrams. :)
• lsh0 9mo ago
  ... aaaand now it's JATS.
• Myrmornis 9mo ago
  Away from applied math/stats, and physics etc, not that many scientists use LaTeX. I'm not saying it's not useful, just I don't think many scientists will feel like a product that's LaTeX based is intended for them.
  • plutomeetsyou 9mo ago
    Economists definitely use LaTeX, but as a field, it's at the intersection of applied math and social sciences so your point stands. I also know some Data Scientists in the industry who do.
• parentheses 9mo ago
  It feels generally a bit dangerous to use an AI product to work on research when (1) it's free and (2) the company hosting it makes money by shipping productized research
  • z3t4 9mo ago
    They have to monetize somehow...
  • biscuit1v9 9mo ago
    Why do you think these points would make the usage dangerous?
  • roflmaostc 9mo ago
    I am not so skeptical about AI usage for paper writing as the paper will be often public days after anyways (pre-print servers such as arXiv). So yes, you use it to write the paper but soon it is public knowledge anyway. I am not sure if there is much to learn from the draft of the authors.
  • GorbachevyChase 9mo ago
    I think the goal is to capture high quality training data to eventually create an automated research product. I could see the value of having drafts, comments, and collaboration discussions as a pattern to train the LLMs to emulate.
• i2km 9mo ago
  LaTeX was one of the last bastions against AI slop. Sadly it's now fallen too. Is there any standardised non-AI disclaimer format which is gaining use?
• unixzii 9mo ago
  It may be useful, but it also encourages people to stop writing their own papers.
  • mves 9mo ago
    As they demo in the video, it even encourages people to actually skip doing the research (which includes reading both relevant AND not-so-relevant papers in order to explore!) Instead, prompt "cite some relevant papers, please", and done. Hours of actual reading, thinking, and exploration reduced to a minimum. A couple of generations of students later, and these will be rare skills: information finding, actual thinking, and conveying complex information in writing.
• i2km 9mo ago
  This is going to be the concrete block which finally breaks the back of the academic peer review system, i.e. it's going to be a DDoS attack on a system which didn't even handle the load before LLMs. Maybe we'll need to go back to some sort of proof-of-work system, i.e. only accepting physical mailed copies of manuscripts, possibly hand-written...
  • make3 9mo ago
    Overleaf basically already has the same thing
  • 4gotunameagain 9mo ago
    > i.e. only accepting physical mailed copies of manuscripts, possibly hand-written... And you think the indians will not hand write the output of LLMs ? Not that I have a better suggestion myself..
  • haspok 9mo ago
    > This is going to be the concrete block which finally breaks the back of the academic peer review system Exactly, and I think this is good news. Let's break it so we can fix at last. Nothing will happen until a real crisis emerges.
    • port11 9mo ago
      Disrupting a system without good proposals for its replacement sounds like a recipe for disaster.
      • butlike 9mo ago
        Reign of terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reign_of_Terror
    • suddenlybananas 9mo ago
      There's problems with the medical system, therefore we should set hospitals on fire to motivate them to make them better.
• jf___ 9mo ago
  <typst>and just when i thought i was out they pull me back in</typst>
• Perseids 9mo ago
  I'm dumbfounded they chose the name of the infamous NSA mass surveillance program revealed by Snowden in 2013. And even more so that there is just one other comment among 320 pointing this out [1]. Has the technical and scientific community in the US already forgotten this huge breach of trust? This is especially jarring at a time where the US is burning its political good-will at unprecedented rate (at least unprecedented during the life-times of most of us) and talking about digital sovereignty has become mainstream in Europe. As a company trying to promote a product, I would stay as far away from that memory as possible, at least if you care about international markets. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46787165 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46787165
  • pageandrew 9mo ago
    These things don't really seem related at all. Its a pretty generic term.
    • ImHereToVote 9mo ago
      They are farming scientists for insight.
    • vaylian 9mo ago
      And yet, the name immediately reminded me of the Snowden relevations.
    • Phelinofist 9mo ago
      FWIW, my immediate reaction was the same "That reminds me of NSA PRISM"
      • karmakurtisaani 9mo ago
        Same here.
        • 3form 9mo ago
          Same, to the point where I was wondering if someone deliberately named it so. But I expect that whoever made this decision simply doesn't know or care.
• mves 9mo ago
  Less thinking, reading, and reflection, and more spouting of text, yay! Just what we need.
• ILoveHorses 9mo ago
  So, basically SciGen[https://davidpomerenke.github.io/scigen.js/ https://davidpomerenke.github.io/scigen.js/] but burning through more GPUs?
• anon1253 9mo ago
  Slightly off-topic but related: currently I'm in a research environment (biomedicine) where a lot of AI is used. Sometimes well, often poorly. So as an exercise I drafted some rules and commitments about AI and research ("Research After AI: Principles for Accelerated Exploration" [1]), I took the Agile manifesto as a starting point. Anyways, this might be interesting as a perspective on the problem space as I see it. [1] https://gist.github.com/joelkuiper/d52cc0e5ff06d12c85e492e4295ca890 https://gist.github.com/joelkuiper/d52cc0e5ff06d12c85e492e42...
• estebarb 9mo ago
  I'm really surprised OpenAI went with LaTeX. ChatGPT still has issues maintaining LaTeX syntax. It still happily switches to markdown notation for quotes or emph. Gemini has a similar problem as well. I guess that there aren't enough good LaTeX documents in the training set.
• ozgung 9mo ago
  I don’t see anything regarding Privacy of your data. Did I miss it or they just use your unpublished research and your prompts as a real human researcher to train their own AI researchers?
• mkl 9mo ago
  > Turn whiteboard equations or diagrams directly into LaTeX, saving hours of time manipulating graphics pixel-by-pixel What a bizarre thing to say! I'm guessing it's slop. Makes it hard to trust anything the article claims.
• arnejenssen 9mo ago
  This assumes that the article, the artifact, is most valuable. But often it is the process of writing the article that has the most value. Prism can be a nice tool for increasing output. But the second order consequence could be that the skill of deep thinking and writing will atrophy. "There is no value added without sweating"
  • lionkor 9mo ago
    Work is value and produces sweat, and OpenAI sells just the sweat.
• dash2 9mo ago
  “LaTeX-native“ Oh NO. We will be stuck in LaTeX hell forever.
• tarcon 9mo ago
  This is a actual prompt in the video: "What are the papers in the literature that are most relevant to this draft and that I should consider citing?" They probably wanted: "... that I should read?" So that this is at least marketed to be more than a fake-paper generation tool.
  • mFixman 9mo ago
    You can tell that they consulted 0 scientists to verify the clearly AI-written draft of this video. The target audience of this tool is not academics; it's OpenAI investors.
  • floitsch 9mo ago
    I felt the same, but then thought of experts in their field. For example, my PhD advisor would already know all these papers. For him the prompt would actually be similar to what was shown in the video.
  • jtr1 9mo ago
    At last, our scientific literature can turn to its true purpose: mapping the entire space of arguable positions (and then some)
• rcastellotti 9mo ago
  wow, this is useless!
• mfld 9mo ago
  I'd like to hypothesize a little bit about the strategy of OpenAI. Obviously, it is nice for academic users that there is a new option for collaborative LaTeX editing plus LLM integration for free. At the same time, I don't think there is much added revenue expected here, for example, from Pro features or additional LLM usage plans. My theory is that the value lies in the training data received from highly skilled academics in the form of accepted and declined suggestions.
  • sn0wr8ven 9mo ago
    It is nice for academics, but I would ask why? These aren't tasks you can't do yourself. Yes it's all in one place, but it's not like doing the exact same thing previously was ridiculous to setup. A comparison comes to mind is the n8n workflow type product they put out before. N8n takes setup. Proofreading, asking for more relevant papers, converting pictures to latex code, etc doesn't take any setup. People do this with or without this tool almost identically.
  • hdivider 9mo ago
    Even that would be quite niche for OpenAI. They raised far too much capital, and now have to deliver on AGI, fast. Or an ultra-high-growth segment, which has not materialized. The reason? I can give you the full source for Sam Altman: while(alive) { RaiseCapital() } That is the full extent of Altman. :)
• egorfine 9mo ago
  > Chat with GPT‑5.2 > Draft and revise papers with the full document as context > ... And pay the finder's fee on every discovery worth pursuing. Yeah, immediately fuck that.
• pmbanugo 9mo ago
  I don't see anything fancy here that Google doesn't do with their Gemini products, and even better
• unicodeveloper 9mo ago
  Not too bad an acquisition though. Scientists need more tech tools just like everyone else to accelerate their work. The faster scientists are, the more discoveries & world class solutions to problems we can have. Maybe OpenAI should acquire Valyu too. They allow you deepresearch on academic papers.
• tyteen4a03 9mo ago
  If you're not a fan of OpenAI: I work at RSpace (https://github.com/rspace-os/rspace-web https://github.com/rspace-os/rspace-web) and we're an open-source research data management system. While we're not as modern as Obsidian or NotebookLM (yet - I'm spearheading efforts to change that :)) we have been deployed at universities and institutions for years now. The solution is currently quite focused on life science needs but if you're curious, check us out!
• BLACKCRAB 9mo ago
  [dead]
• tzahifadida 9mo ago
  Since it offers collaboration for free, it can take a bite out of overleaf market.
• butlike 9mo ago
  > Prism is free to use, and anyone with a ChatGPT account can start writing immediately. Great, so now I'll have to sift through a bunch of ostensibly legitimate (though legitimate looking) non-peer reviewed whitepapers, where if I forget to check the peer review status even once I risk wasting a large amount of time reading gobbledygook. Thanks openai?
  • azan_ 9mo ago
    Don't worry - most of the peer reviewed stuff is also bad.
• PrismerAI 9mo ago
  Prismer-AI team here. We’ve actually been building an open-source stack for this since early 2025. We were fed up with the fragmented paper-to-code workflow too. If you're looking for an open-source alternative to Prism that's already modular and ready to fork, check us out: https://github.com/Prismer-AI/Prismer https://github.com/Prismer-AI/Prismer
• Min0taurr 9mo ago
  Dog turd, will be used to mine research data and train some sort of research AI model, do not trust. I would much rather support Overleaf which is made by academics for academics than some vibe coded alternative with deep data mining. No wonder we have so much slop in research at the moment
• r_thambapillai 9mo ago
  didn't OpenAI just say they needed a code red to be relentlessly focussed on making ChatGPT market leading again? Why are they launching new products? Is the code red over is the gemini threat considered done?
• drakenot 9mo ago
  This is handy for maintaining a resume! I converted my resume to LaTeX with Claude Code recently. Being able to iterate on this code-form of my document is so much nicer than fighting the formatting with in Word/Google Docs. I dropped my .tex file into Prism and it makes it nice to instantly render it.
• smuenkel 9mo ago
  That click towards accepting the bibliography without checking it is absolutely mindboggling.
• slashdave 9mo ago
  Not a PR person myself, but why use as an example a parody topic for a paper? Couldn't someone have invented something realistic to show? Or, heck, just get permission to show a real paper? The example just reinforces the whole concept of LLM slop overwhelming preprint archives. I found it off-putting.
• addedlovely 9mo ago
  Ahhhh. It happily re-wrote the example paper to be from Google AI and added references that supported that falsehood. Slop science papers is just what the world needs.
• random_duck 9mo ago
  "Science"
• random_duck 9mo ago
  So you build overleaf with bloat?
• matteocantiello 9mo ago
  At first I was a bit puzzled about why OpenAI would want to get involved in this somewhat niche project. Obviously, they don't give a damn about Overleaf’s market, which is a drop in the bucket. What OpenAI is after -- I think -- it’s a very specific kind of “training data.” Not Overleaf’s finished papers (those are already public), but the entire workflow. The path from a messy draft to a polished paper captures how ideas actually form: the back-and-forth, the false starts, the collaborative refinement at the frontier of knowledge. That’s an unusually distilled form of cognitive work, and I could imagine that's something one would want in order to train advanced models how to think. Keeping LaTeX as the language is a feature, not a bug: it filters out noise and selects for people trained in STEM, who’ve already learned how to think and work scientifically.