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Posted by meetpateltech 1/27/2026

Prism(openai.com)
781 points | 524 commentspage 5
AndrewKemendo 1/27/2026|
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

f2fff 1/28/2026||
"So whoever figures out the automated reviewer that can actually tell fact from fiction, is going to win this game."

Errr sure. Sounds easy when you write it down. I highly doubt such a thing will ever exist.

AndrewKemendo 1/28/2026||
Who said it was easy?
idontknowmuch 1/28/2026||
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 1/28/2026||
" 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).

radioactivist 1/27/2026||
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 1/27/2026|
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 1/28/2026||
Thanks! (very quickly too)
soulofmischief 1/27/2026||
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.

flockonus 1/27/2026||
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(?)

mkl 1/28/2026||
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/) 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
bitpush 1/27/2026|||
https://github.com/prisma/prisma is its own thing, yeah? not affiliated with Vercel AFAICT.
wetpaws 1/27/2026||
[dead]
mfld 1/28/2026||
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 1/28/2026||
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 1/28/2026||
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. :)

melagonster 1/28/2026||
Prism is a famous software before OpenAI use this name: https://www.graphpad.com/features
nxobject 1/27/2026||
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.

khalic 1/27/2026||
All your papers are belong to us
vicapow 1/27/2026|
Users have full control over whether their data is used to help improve our models
chairhairair 1/27/2026|||
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-futur...

danelski 1/27/2026|||
Only the defaults matter.
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