{"id":206889,"date":"2026-01-26T13:32:00","date_gmt":"2026-01-26T18:32:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/26\/inside-openais-big-play-for-science\/"},"modified":"2026-01-27T05:15:17","modified_gmt":"2026-01-27T10:15:17","slug":"inside-openais-big-play-for-science","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/01\/26\/inside-openais-big-play-for-science\/","title":{"rendered":"Inside OpenAI\u2019s big play for science\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

Inside OpenAI\u2019s big play for science\u00a0<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2026\/01\/26\/1131728\/inside-openais-big-play-for-science\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-01-26 13:32:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.technologyreview.com<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s actually a desirable place to be,\u201d says Weil. \u201cIf you say enough wrong things and then somebody stumbles on a grain of truth and then the other person seizes on it and says, \u2018Oh, yeah, that\u2019s not quite right, but what if we\u2014\u2019 You gradually kind of find your trail through the woods.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is Weil\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

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\u2019s the answer, it might tell scientists: Here\u2019s something to consider.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s actually something that we are spending a bunch of time on,\u201d says Weil. \u201cTrying to make sure that the model has some sort of epistemological humility.\u201d<\/p>\n

Watching the watchers<\/h3>\n

Another thing OpenAI is looking at is how to use GPT-5 to fact-check GPT-5. It\u2019s often the case that if you feed one of GPT-5\u2019s answers back into the model, it will pick it apart and highlight mistakes.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can kind of hook the model up as its own critic,\u201d says Weil. \u201cThen 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, \u2018Hey, wait a minute\u2014this part wasn\u2019t right, but this part was interesting. Keep it.\u2019 It\u2019s almost like a couple of agents working together and you only see the output once it passes the critic.\u201d<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

OpenAI faces stiff competition from rival…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Inside OpenAI\u2019s big play for science\u00a0 https:\/\/www.technologyreview.com\/2026\/01\/26\/1131728\/inside-openais-big-play-for-science\/ Publish Date: 2026-01-26 13:32:00 Source Domain: www.technologyreview.com \u201cThat\u2019s…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":206890,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/wp.technologyreview.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/01\/260122_openaivision_hero.jpg?resize=1200,600","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[17],"class_list":["post-206889","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-llm"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206889"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=206889"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206889\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":206891,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/206889\/revisions\/206891"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/206890"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=206889"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=206889"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=206889"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}