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Prism

openai.com

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Re: Prism

#31

Post by vessenes »

vitalnodo wrote: post #30

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.

Don’t forget replication!

Re: Prism

#32

Post by JBorrow »

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.

Re: Prism

#33

Post by hedora »

cheeseomlit wrote: post #6
postalcoder wrote: post #4

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.

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

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.)

Re: Prism

#34

Post by 0dayman »

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

Re: Prism

#35

Post by vicapow »

vitalnodo wrote: post #2

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 proj…

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.

Re: Prism

#36

Post by legitster »

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.

Re: Prism

#37

Post by markbao »

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…

Re: Prism

#39

Post by AuthAuth »

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.
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