The last couple of months have seen a slew of social media posts and academic publications in which mathematicians, physicists, biologists, and others have described how LLMs (and OpenAI’s GPT-5 in particular) have helped them make a discovery or nudged them toward a solution they might otherwise have missed. In part, OpenAI for Science was set up to engage with this community.
And yet OpenAI is also late to the party. Google DeepMind, the rival firm behind groundbreaking scientific models such as AlphaFold and AlphaEvolve, has had an AI-for-science team for years. (When I spoke to Google DeepMind’s CEO and cofounder Demis Hassabis in 2023 about that team, he told me: “This is the reason I started DeepMind … In fact, it’s why I’ve worked my whole career in AI.”)
So why now? How does a push into science fit with OpenAI’s wider mission? And what exactly is the firm hoping to achieve?
I put these questions to Kevin Weil, a vice president at OpenAI who leads the new OpenAI for Science team, in an exclusive interview last week.
On mission
Weil is a product guy. He joined OpenAI a couple of years ago as chief product officer after being head of product at Twitter and Instagram. But he started out as a scientist. He got two-thirds of the way through a PhD in particle physics at Stanford University before ditching academia for the Silicon Valley dream. Weil is keen to highlight his pedigree: “I thought I was going to be a physics professor for the rest of my life,” he says. “I still read math books on vacation.”
Asked how OpenAI for Science fits with the firm’s existing lineup of white-collar productivity tools or the viral video app Sora, Weil recites the company mantra: “The mission of OpenAI is to try and build artificial general intelligence and, you know, make it beneficial for all of humanity.”
The impact on science of future versions of this technology could be amazing, he says: New medicines, new materials, new devices. “Think about it helping us understand the nature of reality, helping us think through open problems. Maybe the biggest, most positive impact we’re going to see from AGI will actually be from its ability to accelerate science.”
He adds, “With GPT-5, we saw that becoming possible.”