i once asked a bunch of deep-tech researchers on why they wouldn’t use chatgpt for serious research, especially after openai launched Prism …

i once asked a bunch of deep-tech researchers on why they wouldn’t use chatgpt for serious research, especially after openai launched Prism tool around a workflow researchers already know well: LaTeX. Their responses were surprisingly consistent: they were afraid that putting genuinely novel, unpublished ideas into chatgpt or any other llms could expose or compromise their research originality. Whether or not that fear is technically justified, the perception itself is a problem. If OpenAI wants researchers to trust these tools with high-stakes research, there needs to be much more explicit transparency around who can access conversations, how research data is retained, whether it is used for training, and what protections exist for unpublished IP. i assume frontier labs can access at least ~70% of user conversation details internally, even if PII is stripped or access is tightly controlled? We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work. We (the researchers and the agents) did not see any of their work through any means until they released it publicly — in particular, no specific user data was accessed in order to solve th…

Source: Gary Marcus (X) | 2026-09-08