How AI is accelerating scientific discovery today and what's ahead — the OpenAI Podcast Ep. 10

Hello, I'm Andrew Mayne, and this is the OpenAI Podcast. Today, my guests are Kevin Weil, head of OpenAI for Science, and Alex Lupsasca, who is an OpenAI research scientist and professor of physics at Vanderbilt University. We're gonna be discussing how AI is impacting science, an upcoming research paper, and where science may be headed in the next five years.

Maybe the most profound way that people are going to feel AGI in their lives is through science.

With ChatGPT, I can just launch it in that direction, in that direction, that direction.

The acceleration that is going to come from these tools is going to change science.

[upbeat music] So you're running the OpenAI for Science initiative. Could you explain what that's about?

Yeah, the, the mission of OpenAI for Science is to accelerate science. So the, the question is, can we help scientists do the next, say, twenty-five years of scientific research and scientific discovery in five years instead? Science underpins so much of, of, you know, what we do and how we live, and if we can make progress go faster by putting our most advanced models into the hands of the best scientists in the world, we should do that, and that's what we're trying to do. The, the-- you could ask, like, why now? Why didn't we do this a year ago? Why aren't we doing this a year from now? One of the big reasons is we're just starting to see our frontier AI models being able to do novel science. So we're starting to see examples where GPT-5 can actually prove new things. Maybe not yet things that humans could not do-

Mm-hmm.

-but things that humans have not done. So the- these are, like, these little existence proofs of GPT-5 being able to break out past the frontier of human knowledge and into the unknown. And if there's one thing that I've learned from now, uh, you know, a year and a half or so at OpenAI, it's that you go very quickly from the model can't do something, to the model can just barely do something, and it's not great at it yet, but you see these, these, these early examples, and then, you know, six months later, twelve months later, all of a sudden, you couldn't imagine doing this thing without AI. And I think science is in that initial phase where we're seeing real acceleration for scientists that are using AI, sometimes novel, uh, you know, n- not yet maybe large breakthroughs, call them small breakthroughs, and that just says that there's so much potential in this space.

We've seen examples of, let's say, AI helping with mathematical proofs. Could you give me an example of how it might do things in some other areas, like physics or whatever kind of things we might see in the short term?

Yeah, I mean, we're seeing examples every day, and they're across the, the range of, of sort of the scientific frontier. You see examples in mathematics, in physics, uh, astronomy, life sciences, like biology. Uh, Alex, I mean, you've, you've worked on some of these. Maybe, maybe it's a good time to talk about some of the physics stuff that you've seen.