Inside OpenAI’s big play for science

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/01/26/1131728/inside-openais-big-play-for-science/

Publish Date: 2026-01-26 13:32:00

“That’s actually a desirable place to be,” says Weil. “If you say enough wrong things and then somebody stumbles on a grain of truth and then the other person seizes on it and says, ‘Oh, yeah, that’s not quite right, but what if we—’ You gradually kind of find your trail through the woods.”

This is Weil’s core vision for OpenAI for Science. GPT-5 is good, but it is not an oracle. The value of this technology is in pointing people in new directions, not coming up with definitive answers, he says.

In fact, one of the things OpenAI is now looking at is making GPT-5 dial down its confidence when it delivers a response. Instead of saying Here’s the answer, it might tell scientists: Here’s something to consider.

“That’s actually something that we are spending a bunch of time on,” says Weil. “Trying to make sure that the model has some sort of epistemological humility.”

Watching the watchers

Another thing OpenAI is looking at is how to use GPT-5 to fact-check GPT-5. It’s often the case that if you feed one of GPT-5’s answers back into the model, it will pick it apart and highlight mistakes.

“You can kind of hook the model up as its own critic,” says Weil. “Then you can get a workflow where the model is thinking and then it goes to another model, and if that model finds things that it could improve, then it passes it back to the original model and says, ‘Hey, wait a minute—this part wasn’t right, but this part was interesting. Keep it.’ It’s almost like a couple of agents working together and you only see the output once it passes the critic.”

What Weil is describing also sounds a lot like what Google DeepMind did with AlphaEvolve, a tool that wrapped the firms LLM, Gemini, inside a wider system that filtered out the good responses from the bad and fed them back in again to be improved on. Google DeepMind has used AlphaEvolve to solve several real-world problems.

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