… OpenAI is making an explicit play for scientists. In October, the firm announced that it had launched a whole new team, called OpenAI for Science, dedicated to exploring how its large language models could help scientists and tweaking its tools to support them.
[There’s been] a slew of social media posts and academic publications in which mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and others have described how LLMs (and OpenAI’s GPT-5 in particular) have helped them make a discovery or nudged them toward a solution they might otherwise have missed.
The key things that GPT-5 seems to be good at are finding references and connections to existing work that scientists were not aware of, which sometimes sparks new ideas; helping scientists sketch mathematical proofs; and suggesting ways for scientists to test hypotheses in the lab.
“GPT 5.2 has read substantially every paper written in the last 30 years,” says Kevin Weil, who leads the new OpenAI for Science team]. “And it understands not just the field that a particular scientist is working in; it can bring together analogies from other, unrelated fields.”
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“That’s incredibly powerful” ….
