[HN Gopher] Prism
___________________________________________________________________
Prism
Author : meetpateltech
Score : 274 points
Date : 2026-01-27 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (openai.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (openai.com)
| vitalnodo wrote:
| 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
|
| [1]
| https://www.reddit.com/r/Crixet/comments/1ptj9k9/comment/nvh...
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42009254
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46394937
| songodongo wrote:
| So this is the product of an acquisition?
| vitalnodo wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.)
| radioactivist wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| warkdarrior wrote:
| Collaboration is at best rocky when people have different
| versions of LaTeX packages installed. Also merging changes
| from multiple people in git are a pain when dealing with
| scientific, nuanced text.
|
| Overleaf ensures that everyone looks at the same version of
| the document and processes the document with the same set
| of packages and options.
| jdranczewski wrote:
| To add to the points raised by others, "just install LaTeX"
| is not imo a very strong argument. I prefer working in a
| local environment, but many of my colleagues much prefer a
| web app that "just works" to figuring out what MiKTeX is.
| vicapow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| doctorpangloss wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Am I missing something? LaTeX is associated with slop now?
| WolfOliver wrote:
| 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
| postalcoder wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Surprised they didn't do something trendy like Prizm or
| OpenPrism while keeping it closed source code.
| cheeseomlit wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I suspect that name recognition for PRISM as a program is not
| high at the population level.
| maqp wrote:
| 2027: OpenAI Skynet - "Robots help us everywhere, It's coming
| to your door"
| willturman wrote:
| Skynet? C'mon. That would be too obvious - like naming a
| company _Palantir_.
| wilg wrote:
| I followed the Snowden stuff fairly closely and forgot, so I
| bet they didn't think about it at all and if they did they
| didn't care and that was surely the right call.
| moralestapia wrote:
| I never though of that association, not in the slightest, until
| I read this comment.
| seanhunter wrote:
| Pretty much every company I've worked for in tech over my 25+
| year career had a (different) system called prism.
| no-dr-onboard wrote:
| (plot twist: he works for NSA contractors)
| songodongo wrote:
| Or the JavaScript ORM.
| locusofself wrote:
| this was my first thought as well.
| vjk800 wrote:
| I'd think that most people in science would associate the name
| with an optical prism. A single large political event can't
| override an everyday physical phenomenon in my head.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| This was my first thought as well. Prism is a cool name, but
| I'd never ever use it for a technical product after those
| leaks, ever.
| blitzar wrote:
| Guessing that Ai came up with the name based on the description
| of the product.
|
| Perhaps, like the original PRISM programme, behind the door is
| a massive data harvesting operation.
| etiam wrote:
| I think most people who'd catch that expect the company joined
| in 2024, if not before?
|
| https://futurism.com/the-byte/snowden-openai-calculated-betr...
|
| Friendly reminder?
| DominikPeters wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Accessibility does matter
| vicapow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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
| hulitu wrote:
| > Introducing Prism Accelerating science writing and
| collaboration with AI.
|
| I thought this was introduced by the NSA some time ago.
| shevy-java wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Does "as it is currently used" include what this apparently is
| (brainstorming, initial research, collaboration, text
| formatting, sharing ideas, etc)?
| Jaxan wrote:
| Yeah, there are already way more papers being published than we
| can reasonably read. Collaboration, ok, but we don't need more
| writing.
| preommr wrote:
| Very underwhelming.
|
| Was this not already possible in the web ui or through a vscode-
| like editor?
| vicapow wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| MattDaEskimo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| > 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.
| vitalnodo wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Don't forget replication!
| olivia-banks wrote:
| I'm curious how you think AI would aide in this.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| Replicate this <slop>
|
| Ok! Here's <more slop>
| olivia-banks wrote:
| I don't think you understand what replication means in
| this context.
| vessenes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| AI generating references seems like a hop away from absolute
| unverifiable trash.
| CJefferson wrote:
| What the heck is the point of a reference you never read?
| lupsasca wrote:
| By "grabbing references" I meant queries of the type "add
| paper [bla] to the bibliography" -- that seems useful to
| me!
| nestes wrote:
| Focusing in on "grabbing references", it's as easy as
| drag-and-drop if you use Zotero. It can copy/paste
| references in BibTeX format. You can even customize it
| through the BetterBibTeX extension.
|
| If you're not a Zotero user, I can't recommend it enough.
| bloppe wrote:
| I wonder if there's a way to tax the frivolous submissions.
| There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed
| iff the submission is actually accepted for publication. If
| you're confident in your paper, you can think of it as a
| deposit. If you're spamming journals, you're just going to pay
| for the wasted time.
|
| Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no
| obvious hallucinations.
| throwaway85825 wrote:
| Pay to publish journals already exist.
| bloppe wrote:
| This is sorta the opposite of pay to publish. It's pay to
| be rejected.
| olivia-banks wrote:
| I would think it would act more like a security deposit,
| and you'd get back 100%, no profit for the journal (at
| least in that respect).
| s0rce wrote:
| That would be tricky, I often submitted to multiple high
| impact journals going down the list until someone accepted
| it. You try to ballpark where you can go but it can be worth
| aiming high. Maybe this isn't a problem and there should be
| payment for the efforts to screen the paper but then I would
| expect the reviewers to be paid for their time.
| noitpmeder wrote:
| I mean your methodology also sounds suspect. You're just
| going down a list until it sticks. You don't care where it
| ends up (I'm sure within reason) just as long as it is
| accepted and published somewhere (again, within reason).
| niek_pas wrote:
| Scientists are incentivized to publish in as high-ranking
| a journal as possible. You're always going to have at
| least a few journals where your paper is a good fit, so
| aiming for the most ambitious journal first just makes
| sense.
| mathematicaster wrote:
| This is effectively standard across the board.
| antasvara wrote:
| No different from applying to jobs. Much like companies,
| there are a variety of journals with varying levels of
| prestige or that fit your paper better/worse. You don't
| know in advance which journals will respond to your
| paper, which ones just received submissions similar to
| yours, etc.
|
| Plus, the t in me from submission to acceptance/rejection
| can be long. For cutting edge science, you can't really
| afford to wait to hear back before applying to another
| journal.
|
| All this to say that spamming 1,000 journals with a
| submission is bad, but submitting to the journals in your
| field that are at least decent fits for your paper is
| good practice.
| JBorrow wrote:
| The journal that I'm an editor for is 'diamond open access',
| which means we charge no submission fees and no publication
| fees, and publish open access. This model is really important
| in allowing legitimate submissions from a wide range of
| contributors (e.g. PhD students in countries with low levels
| of science funding). Publishing in a traditional journal
| usually costs around $3000.
| methuselah_in wrote:
| Welcome to new world of fake stuff i guess
| NewsaHackO wrote:
| Those journals are really good for getting practice in
| writing and submitting research papers, but sometimes they
| are already seen as less impactful because of the quality
| of accepted papers. At least where I am at, I don't think
| the advent of AI writing is going to affect how they are
| seen.
| petcat wrote:
| > There could be a submission fee that would be fully
| reimbursed if the submission is actually accepted for
| publication.
|
| While well-intentioned, I think this is just gate-keeping.
| There are _mountains_ of research that result in nothing
| interesting whatsoever (aside from learning about what doesn
| 't work). And all of that is still valuable knowledge!
| ezst wrote:
| Sure, but now we can't even assume that such research is
| submitted in good faith anymore. There just seems to be no
| perfect solution.
|
| Maybe something like a "hierarchy/DAG? of trusted-peers",
| where groups like universities certify the relevance and
| correctness of papers by attaching their name and a global
| reputation score to it. When it's found that the paper is
| "undesirable" and doesn't pass a subsequent review, their
| reputation score deteriorates (with the penalty propagating
| along the whole review chain), in such a way that:
|
| - the overall review model is distributed, hence scalable
| (everybody may play the certification game and build a
| reputation score while doing so) - trusted/established
| institutions have an incentive to keep their global
| reputation score high and either put a very high level of
| scrutiny to the review, or delegate to very reputable peers
| - "bad actors" are immediately punished and universally
| recognized as such - "bad groups" (such as departments
| consistently spamming with low quality research) become
| clearly identified as such within the greater organisation
| (the university), which can encourage a mindset of quality
| above quantity - "good actors within a bad group" are not
| penalised either because they could circumvent their "bad
| group" on the global review market by having reputable
| institutions (or intermediaries) certify their good work
|
| There are loopholes to consider, like a black market of
| reputation trading (I'll pay you generously to sacrifice a
| bit of your reputation to get this bad science published),
| but even that cannot pay off long-term in an open system
| where all transactions are visible.
|
| Incidentally, I think this may be a rare case where a
| blockchain makes some sense?
| gus_massa wrote:
| This idea looks very similar to journals! Each journal
| has a reputation, if they publish too much crap, the crap
| is not cited and the impact factors decrease. Also, they
| have an informal reputation, because impact index also
| has problems.
|
| Anyway, how will universities check the papers? Somone
| must read the preprints, like the current reviewers.
| Someone must check the incoming preprints, find reviewers
| and make the final decition, like the current editors.
| ...
| amitav1 wrote:
| How would this work for independent researchers?
|
| (no snark)
| pixelready wrote:
| I'd worry about creating a perverse incentive to farm
| rejected submissions. Similar to those renter application fee
| scams.
| utilize1808 wrote:
| Better yet, make a "polymarket" for papers where people can
| bet on which paper can make it, and rely on "expertise
| arbitrage" to punish spams.
| ezst wrote:
| Doesn't stop the flood, i.e. the unfair asymmetry between
| the effort to produce vs. effort to review.
| mathematicaster wrote:
| Pay to review is common in Econ and Finance.
| skissane wrote:
| Variation I thought of on pay-to-review:
|
| Suppose you are an independent researcher writing a paper.
| Before submitting it for review to journals, you could hire
| a published author in that field to review it for you
| (independently of the journal), and tell you whether it is
| submission-worthy, and help you improve it to the point it
| was. If they wanted, they could be listed as coauthor, and
| if they don't want that, at least you'd acknowledge their
| assistance in the paper.
|
| Because I think there are two types of people who might
| write AI slop papers: (1) people who just don't care and
| want to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks;
| (2) people who genuinely desire to seriously contribute to
| the field, but don't know what they are doing. Hiring an
| advisor could help the second group of people.
|
| Of course, I don't know how willing people would be to be
| hired to do this. Someone who was senior in the field might
| be too busy, might cost too much, or might worry about
| damage to their own reputation. But there are so many
| unemployed and underemployed academics out there...
| usefulposter wrote:
| Completely agree. Look at the independent research that gets
| submitted under "Show HN" nowadays:
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
|
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
| SecretDreams wrote:
| I appreciate and sympathize with this take. I'll just note
| that, in general, journal publications have gone considerably
| downhill over the last decade, even before the advent of AI.
| Frequency has gone up, quality has gone down, and the ability
| to actually check if everything in the article is actually
| valid is quite challenging as frequency goes up.
|
| This is a space that probably needs substantial reform, much
| like grad school models in general (IMO).
| InsideOutSanta wrote:
| I'm scared that this type of thing is going to do to science
| journals what AI-generated bug reports is doing to bug
| bounties. We're truly living in a post-scarcity society now,
| except that the thing we have an abundance of is garbage, and
| it's drowning out everything of value.
| jcranmer wrote:
| The first casualty of LLMs was the slush pile--the
| unsolicited submission pile for publishers. We've since seen
| bug bounty programs and open source repositories buckle under
| the load of AI-generated contributions. And all of these have
| the same underlying issue: the LLM makes it easy to do things
| that don't immediately look like garbage, which makes the
| volume of submission skyrocket while the time-to-reject also
| goes up slightly because it passes the first (but only the
| first) absolute garbage filter.
| techblueberry wrote:
| There's this thing where all the thought leaders in software
| engineering ask "What will change about building about
| building a business when code is free" and while, there are
| some cool things, I've also thought, like it could have some
| pretty serious negative externalities? I think this question
| is going to become big everywhere - business, science, etc.
| which is like - Ok, you have all this stuff, but do is it
| valuable? Which of it actually takes away value?
| jplusequalt wrote:
| Digital pollution.
| willturman wrote:
| In a corollary to Sturgeon's Law, I'd propose Altman's Law:
| "In the Age of AI, 99.999...% of everything is crap"
| SimianSci wrote:
| Altman's Law: 99% of all content is slop
|
| I can get behind this. This assumes a tool will need to be
| made to help determine the 1% that isn't slop. At which
| point I assume we will have reinvented web search once
| more.
|
| Has anyone looked at reviving PageRank?
| Imustaskforhelp wrote:
| I mean Kagi is probably the PageRank revival we are
| talking about.
|
| I have heard from people here that Kagi can help remove
| slop from searches so I guess yeah.
|
| Although I guess I am DDG user and I love using DDG as
| well because its free as well but I can see how for some
| price can be a non issue and they might like kagi more.
|
| So Kagi / DDG (Duckduckgo) yeah.
| maxkfranz wrote:
| I generally agree.
|
| On the other hand, the world is now a different place as
| compared to when several prominent journals were founded
| (1869-1880 for Nature, Science, Elsevier). The tacit
| assumptions upon which they were founded might no longer hold
| in the future. The world is going to continue to change, and
| the publication process as it stands might need to adapt for it
| to be sustainable.
| ezst wrote:
| As I understand it, the problem isn't publication or how it's
| changing over time, it's about the challenges of producing
| new science when the existing one is muddied in plausible
| lies. That warrants a new process by which to assess the
| inherent quality of a paper, but even if it comes as globally
| distributed, the cheats have a huge advantage considering the
| asymmetry between the effort to vibe produce vs. the tedious
| human review.
| maxkfranz wrote:
| That's a good point. On the other hand, we've had that
| problem long before AI. You already need to mentally filter
| papers based on your assessment of the reputability of the
| authors.
|
| The whole process should be made more transparent and open
| from the start, rather than adding more gatekeeping. There
| ought to be openness and transparency throughout the entire
| research process, with auditing-ability automatically baked
| in, rather than just at the time of publication. One man's
| opinion, anyway.
| Rperry2174 wrote:
| This keeps repeating in different domains: we lower the cost of
| producing artifacts and the real bottleneck is evaluating them.
|
| For developers, academics, editors, etc... in any review driven
| system the scarcity is around good human judgement not text
| volume. Ai doesn't remove that constraint and arguably puts
| more of a spotlight on the ability to separate the shit from
| the quality.
|
| Unless review itself becomes cheaper or better, this just
| shifts work further downstream and disguising the change as
| "efficiency"
| vitalnodo wrote:
| This fits into the broader evolution of the visualization
| market. As data grows, visualization becomes as important as
| processing. This applies not only to applications, but also
| to relating texts through ideas close to transclusion in Ted
| Nelson's Xanadu. [0]
|
| In education, understanding is often best demonstrated not by
| restating text, but by presenting the same data in another
| representation and establishing the right analogies and
| isomorphisms, as in Explorable Explanations. [1]
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40295661
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22368323
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| This has been discussed previously as "workslop", where you
| produce something that looks at surface level like high
| quality work, but just shifts the burden to the receiver of
| the workslop to review and fix.
| boplicity wrote:
| Is it at all possible to have a policy that bans the submission
| of any AI written text, or text that was written with the
| assistance of AI tools? I understand that this would, by
| necessity, be under an "honor system" but maybe it could help
| weed out papers not worth the time?
| currymj wrote:
| this is probably a net negative as there are many very good
| scientists with not very strong English skills.
|
| the early years of LLMs (when they were good enough to
| correct grammar but not enough to generate entire slop
| papers) were an equalizer. we may end up here but it would be
| unfortunate.
| mrandish wrote:
| As a non-scientist (but long-time science fan and user), I feel
| your pain with what appears to be a layered, intractable
| problem.
|
| > > who are looking to 'boost' their CV
|
| Ultimately, this seems like a key root cause - misaligned
| incentives across a multi-party ecosystem. And as always,
| incentives tend to be deeply embedded and highly resistant to
| change.
| jascha_eng wrote:
| Why not filter out papers from people without credentials? And
| also publicly call them out and register them somewhere, so
| that their submission rights can be revoked by other journals
| and conferences after "vibe writing".
|
| These acts just must have consequences so people stop doing
| them. You can use AI if you are doing it well but if you are
| wasting everyones time you should just be excluded from the
| discourse altogether.
| jjcm wrote:
| The comparison to make here is that a journal submission is
| effectively a pull request to humanities scientific knowlegde
| base. That PR has to be reviewed. We're already seeing the
| effects of this with open source code - the number of PR
| submissions have skyrocketed, overwhelming maintainers.
|
| This is still a good step in a direction of AI assisted
| research, but as you said, for the moment it creates as many
| problems as it solves.
| SchemaLoad wrote:
| GenAI largely seems like a DDoS on free resources. The effort
| to review this stuff is now massively more than the effort to
| "create" it, so really what is the point of even submitting it,
| the reviewer could have generated it themself. Seeing it in
| software development where coworkers are submitting massive PRs
| they generated but hardly read or tested. Shifting the real
| work to the PR review.
|
| I'm not sure what the final state would be here but it seems we
| are going to find it increasingly difficult to find any real
| factual information on the internet going forward. Particularly
| as AI starts ingesting it's own generated fake content.
| cryzinger wrote:
| More relevant than ever:
|
| > The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order
| of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law
| overfeed wrote:
| > The effort to review this stuff is now massively more than
| the effort to "create" it
|
| I don't doubt the AI companies will soon announce products
| that will claim to solve this very problem, generating
| turnkey submission reviews. Double-dipping is very
| profitable.
|
| It appears LLM-parasitism isn't close to being done, and
| keeps finding new commons to spoil.
| keithnz wrote:
| wouldn't AI actually be good for filtering given it's going to
| be a lot better at knowing what has been published? Also seems
| possible that it could actually work out papers that have ideas
| that are novel, or at least come up with some kind of likely
| score.
| jll29 wrote:
| I totally agree. I spend my whole day from getting up to going
| to bed (not before reading HN!) on reviews for a conference I'm
| co-organizing later this year.
|
| So I was not amused about this announcement at all, however
| easy it may make my own life as an author (I'm pretty happy to
| do my own literature search, thank you very much).
|
| Also remember, we have no guarantee that these tools will still
| exist tomorrow, all these AI companies are constantly pivoting
| and throwing a lot of things at the wall to see what sticks.
|
| OpenAI chose not to build a serious product, as there is no
| integration with the ACM DL, the IEEE DL, SpringerNatureLink,
| the ACL Anthology, Wiley, Cambridge/Oxford/Harvard University
| Press etc. - only papers that are not peer reviewed (arXiv.org)
| are available/have been integrated. Expect a flood of BS your
| way.
|
| When my student submit a piece of writing, I can ask them to
| orally defend their opus maximum (more and more often,
| ChatGPT's...); I can't do the same with anonymous authors.
| 0dayman wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| legitster wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| markbao wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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/
| crazygringo wrote:
| 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.
| maxkfranz wrote:
| 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.
| AuthAuth wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| All your papers are belong to us
| vicapow wrote:
| Users have full control over whether their data is used to help
| improve our models
| ai_critic wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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.
| verdverm wrote:
| It's all performance over practice at this point. Look to the
| current US administration as the barometer by which many are
| measuring their public perceptions
| renyicircle wrote:
| It's as if it's marketed to the students who have been using
| ChatGPT for the last few years to pass courses and now need to
| throw together a bachelor's thesis. Bibliography and proper
| citation requirements are a pain.
| olivia-banks wrote:
| I agree with this. This problem is only going to get worse
| once these people enter academia and facing needing to
| publish.
| pfisherman wrote:
| That is such a bummer. At the time, it was annoying and I
| groused and grumbled about it; but in hindsight my reviewers
| pointed me toward some good articles, and I am better for
| having read them.
| thesuitonym wrote:
| You may notice that this is the way writing papers works in
| undergraduate courses. It's just another in a long line of
| examples of MBA tech bros gleaning an extremely surface-level
| understanding of a topic, then decided they're experts.
| adverbly wrote:
| I chuckled at that part too!
|
| Didn't even open a single one of the papers to look at them!
| Just said that one is not relevant without even opening it.
| sfink wrote:
| Yes. That part of the video was straight-up "here's how to
| automate academic fraud". Those papers could just as easily
| negate one of your assumptions. What even _is_ research if it
| 's not _using_ cited works?
|
| "I know nothing but had an idea and did some work. I have no
| clue whether this question has been explored or settled one way
| or another. But here's my new paper claiming to be an
| incremental improvement on... whatever the previous state of
| understanding was. I wouldn't know, I haven't read up on it
| yet. Too many papers to write."
| maxkfranz wrote:
| A more apt example would have been to show finding a particular
| paper you want to cite, but you don't want to be bothered
| searching your reference manager or Google Scholar.
|
| E.g. "cite that paper from John Doe on lorem ipsum, but make
| sure it's the 2022 update article that I cited in one of my
| other recent articles, not the original article"
| jumploops wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| I postulate 90% of the reason openai now has "variants" for
| different use cases is just to capture training data...
| verdverm wrote:
| 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?
| lispisok wrote:
| 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_ wrote:
| > In 2025, AI changed software development forever. In 2026, we
| expect a comparable shift in science,
|
| I can't wait
| AlexCoventry wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 :)
| hit8run wrote:
| They are really desperate now, right?
| pwdisswordfishy wrote:
| Oh, like that mass surveillance program!
| reassess_blind wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Probably used their product to write it
| exyi wrote:
| ... or they teached GPT to use em-dashes, because of their love
| for em-dashes :)
| torginus wrote:
| I haven't used MS Word in quite a while, but I distinctly
| remember it changed minus signs to em dashes.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| 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.
| jsrozner wrote:
| AI: enshittifying everything you once cared about or relied upon
|
| (re the decline of scientific integrity / signal-to-noise ratio
| in science)
| asadm wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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?
| beklein wrote:
| 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
| vicapow wrote:
| Hope you like it :D I'm here if you have questions, too
| oytmeal wrote:
| Some things are worth doing the "hard way".
| falcor84 wrote:
| Reminds me of that dystopian virtual sex scene in Demolition
| Man (slightly nsfw) - https://youtu.be/E3yARIfDJrY
| falcor84 wrote:
| 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.
| flumpcakes wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Naming things is hard.
| andrepd wrote:
| "Chatgpt writes scientific papers" is somehow being advertised as
| a good thing. What is there even left to say?
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| 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
| Onavo wrote:
| 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.
| noahbp wrote:
| They seem to have copied Cursor in hijacking [?]Y shortcut for
| "Yes" instead of Undo.
| flockonus wrote:
| 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 (c)2026
| Prisma Data, Inc. -- curiosity still persists(?)
| bitpush wrote:
| https://github.com/prisma/prisma is its own thing, yeah? not
| affiliated with Vercel AFAICT.
| CobrastanJorji wrote:
| "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 wrote:
| Is this the product where OpenAI will (soon) take profit share
| from inventions made there?
| bmaranville wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| Bringing slop to science.
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