Prism

Today I trialed out OpenAI’s new scientific writing tool, Prism. I wasn’t super impressed with where it is NOW, but I love where it could potentially go.

Writing academic and scientific papers is hard, and always will be. But one of the things that is unnecessarily difficult is incorporating LaTeX, which is essentially the way mathematical formulas are presented in text.

This is, or should I say, was, a real bugbear. Unless your equation is something like 1+1=2, then things get difficult and difficult to read. If I gave you the equation |sqrt((4*5)/(2^3)|^(1/(3-x)) you would have to read it like 10 times to finally get it. Whereas if you saw it expressed as

Which expressed graphically, looks like:

It feels trivial to be able to show these, BUT, they ‘re really difficult to present cleanly. When I was doing my Honours Thesis, I spent SO much time trying to figure this out and force it into Word without breaking everything. I managed it, eventually, but it was a poor use of time.

With Prism, I hope this is taken away, and more scientists, academics, and hacks (like me!) can spend their time on discovery, and less on formatting.

You can access Prism HERE.