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Posted by meetpateltech 1/27/2026

Prism(openai.com)
781 points | 524 commentspage 2
plastic041 1/27/2026|
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 1/27/2026||
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 1/28/2026|||
> 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 1/28/2026|||
Yes but you should read your bibliography.
alphazard 1/27/2026||
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.

iterance 1/28/2026|||
In coursework, references are often a way of demonstrating the reading one did on a topic before committing to a course of argumentation. They also contextualize what exactly the student's thinking is in dialogue with, since general familiarity with a topic can't be assumed in introductory coursework. Citation minimums are usually imposed as a means of encouraging a student to read more about a topic before synthesizing their thoughts, and as a means of demonstrating that work to a professor. While there may have been administrative reasons for the citation minimum, the concept behind them is not unfounded, though they are probably not the most effective way of achieving that goal.

While similar, the function is fundamentally different from citations appearing in research. However, even professionally, it is well beyond rare for a philosophical work, even for professional philosophers, to be written truly ex nihilo as you seem to be suggesting. Citation is an essential component of research dialogue and cannot be elided.

bonsai_spool 1/28/2026||||
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority

Hmm, I guess I read this as a requirement to find enough supportive evidence to establish your argument as novel (or at least supported in 'established' logic).

An appeal to authority explicitly has no reasoning associated with it; is your argument that one should be able to quote a blog as well as a journal article?

tyre 1/28/2026||
It’s also a way of getting people to read things about the subject that they otherwise wouldn’t. I read a lot of philosophy because it was relevant to a paper I was writing, but wasn’t assigned to the entire class.
_bohm 1/28/2026||||
Huh? It's quite sensible to make reference to someone else's work when writing a philosophy paper, and there are many ways to do so that do not amount to an appeal to authority.
bogdan 1/28/2026||
He's point is that they asked for a minimum number of references not references in general
fxwin 1/28/2026|||
> Citing a paper to defend your position is just an appeal to authority (a fallacy that they teach you about in the same class).

an appeal to authority is fallacious when the authority is unqualified for the subject at hand. Citing a paper from a philosopher to support a point isn't fallacious, but "<philosophical statement> because my biology professor said so" is.

danelski 1/27/2026||
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). 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.
DominikPeters 1/27/2026||
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.
qbit42 1/27/2026||
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 1/27/2026|||
Getting close to the "why Dropbox when you can rsync" mistake (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224)

@vicapow replied to keep the Dropbox parallel alive

DominikPeters 1/28/2026||
Yeah I realized the parallel while I was writing my comment! I guess what I'm thinking is that a much better experience is available and there is no in-principle reason why overleaf and prism have to be so much worse, especially in the age of vibe-coding. Prism feels like the result of two days of Claude Code, when they should have invested at least five days.
vicapow 1/27/2026|||
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.

yfontana 1/28/2026|||
> Certainly can’t compete with using VS Code or TeXstudio locally, collaborating through GitHub, and getting AI assistance from Claude Code or Codex.

I have a phd in economics. Most researchers in that field have never even heard of any of those tools. Maybe LaTeX, but few actually use it. I was one of very few people in my department using Zotero to manage my bibliography, most did that manually.

jstummbillig 1/27/2026||
Accessibility does matter
rockskon 1/28/2026||
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 1/28/2026|
Sir, my tin hat is on.
beklein 1/27/2026||
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
swyx 1/27/2026||
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 1/28/2026||
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 1/29/2026||
not at all about stealing karma, i dont care much about fake internet points.

yes you got the important thing!

vicapow 1/27/2026||
Hope you like it :D I'm here if you have questions, too
Onavo 1/27/2026||
It would be interesting to see how they would compete with the incumbents like

https://Elicit.com

https://Consensus.app

https://Scite.ai

https://Scispace.com

https://Scienceos.ai

https://Undermind.ai

Lots of players in this space.

jumploops 1/27/2026||
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.

PrismerAI 1/28/2026||
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
sva_ 1/27/2026||
> In 2025, AI changed software development forever. In 2026, we expect a comparable shift in science,

I can't wait

falcor84 1/27/2026|
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 1/28/2026|
Just more coal to the hype-train - AI companies can't afford news cycle without anything AI. Stock prices must grow!
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