Latent Space: The AI Engineer Podcast · Latent.Space

⚡️ Prism: OpenAI's LaTeX "Cursor for Scientists" — Kevin Weil & Victor Powell, OpenAI for Science

·36 min·3 clips

Watch Prism transform a hand-drawn diagram into perfect LaTeX code in seconds.

OpenAI for Science is Kevin Weil's team working on both model capabilities for scientific reasoning and tools that embed AI into scientists' actual workflows. The first product is Prism, a free LaTeX editor that brings AI assistance directly into the environment where physicists, mathematicians, and scientists write papers. Victor Powell built a prototype independently as a company called Crayta, working in stealth and focused entirely on product to the exclusion of publicity. Weil found him through a mention on a Reddit LaTeX forum, sent a cold DM on Twitter, and eventually negotiated an acquisition. LaTeX has been the standard for scientific typesetting for decades because it handles equations, diagrams, and references in ways that word processors cannot, but the tooling has not evolved significantly since the 1990s. Prism addresses the most tedious parts: it keeps all project files in context for the AI automatically (no copy-pasting into ChatGPT), compiles the PDF as changes are made, and surfaces AI suggestions as a diff interface (red for what changes, green for what replaces it). The live demo shows: proofing an introduction section of a black hole physics paper with suggested simplifications; converting a whiteboard commutative diagram photo into TikZ LaTeX code; asking the model to verify that a mathematical operator in the paper is genuinely a symmetry of a given equation (with the model carrying out the proof step by step); and generating a 30-minute set of general relativity lecture notes in parallel while the other tasks run. Multiple parallel chats can run against the same set of files simultaneously. The hosts discuss the broader thesis: that the software engineering acceleration of the past year came not just from better models but from embedding AI into IDEs and workflows. Prism attempts to replicate that pattern for science.

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