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Posted by meetpateltech 1/27/2026

Prism(openai.com)
781 points | 524 commentspage 3
maest 1/28/2026|
Burried halfway through the article.

> Prism is a free workspace for scientific writing and collaboration

jeffybefffy519 1/27/2026||
I postulate 90% of the reason openai now has "variants" for different use cases is just to capture training data...
cauliflower2718 1/28/2026|
ChatGPT lets you refuse to allow your content to be used for training (under Preferences -> Data controls), but Prism does not.
Jhater 1/28/2026||
[dead]
vitalnodo 1/27/2026||
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 1/27/2026|
Don’t forget replication!
olivia-banks 1/27/2026||
I'm curious how you think AI would aide in this.
vessenes 1/27/2026|||
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.

noitpmeder 1/27/2026|||
Replicate this <slop>

Ok! Here's <more slop>

olivia-banks 1/27/2026||
I don't think you understand what replication means in this context.
NateEag 1/28/2026||
I think they do, and you missed some biting, insightful commentary on using LLMs for scientific research.
markbao 1/27/2026||
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…
crazygringo 1/27/2026||
100% completely agreed. It's not the future, it's the past.

Typst feels more like the future: 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 1/28/2026||
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 1/27/2026|||
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 1/28/2026|||
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/

auxym 1/27/2026|||
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/

hatmatrix 1/28/2026||
That study must have compared beginners in LaTeX and MS Word. There is a learning curve, but LaTeX will often save more time in the end.

It is an old language though. LaTeX is the macro system on top of TeX, but now you can write markdown or org-mode (or orgdown) and generate LaTeX -> PDF via pandoc/org-mode. Maybe this is the level of abstraction we should be targeting. Though currently, you still need to drop into LaTeX for very specific fine-tuning.

BizarroLand 1/27/2026||
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.

sbszllr 1/27/2026||
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 1/28/2026|
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.

anon1253 1/28/2026||
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/d52cc0e5ff06d12c85e492e42...

WolfOliver 1/27/2026||
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

bonsai_spool 1/28/2026||
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.

tyteen4a03 1/28/2026|
If you're not a fan of OpenAI: I work at RSpace (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!

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