Exclusive: OpenAI wants to be a scientific research partner
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Illustration: Aïda Amer/Axios
AI is increasingly being used as a research collaborator for mathematicians and scientists, per a new report from OpenAI shared exclusively with Axios.
Why it matters: OpenAI argues that AI can make scientists more productive by upping the amount of research that can get done, ultimately leading to more life-saving breakthroughs.
By the numbers: Per OpenAI's report, an internal analysis of a random sample of anonymized ChatGPT conversations from January to December of last year showed:
- Average weekly message counts on "advanced hard-science topics" grew nearly 47% over the year.
- As of January of this year, nearly 1.3 million weekly users are discussing "advanced topics in hard science" with an average of 8.4 million ChatGPT messages on those topics.
Topics include graduate and research-level math, physics, chemistry, biology and engineering.
- Among the OpenAI users and messages sampled, ChatGPT was used most for advanced research in computer science, data science and AI.
What they're saying: "More researchers are using advanced reasoning systems to make progress on open problems, interpret complex data, and iterate faster in experimental work," Kevin Weil, VP of OpenAI for Science, said in the report.
- "We're still early, but the pace of adoption and the quality of
the work suggest science is entering a new acceleration phase."
How it works: Most scientists and engineers use ChatGPT for writing and communications, per the report. The smallest share use it for analysis and calculations.
- GPT-5.2 has now "progressed past competition level performance toward mathematical discovery," according to the report, with the most users turning to it for structural equation models.
- The report also shows frequent ChatGPT use for computational chemistry and particle physics, among other types of biology, chemistry and physics work.
What we're watching: OpenAI is urging policymakers to enhance science and research uses of AI, including scaling AI skilling, opening up data and frontier AI access to more people, and modernizing AI infrastructure.
Disclosure: Axios and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI to access part of Axios' story archives while helping fund the launch of Axios into four local cities and providing some AI tools. Axios has editorial independence.
