Want to help accelerate scientific discovery? Join our team at OpenAI: linkedin.com/jobs/view/44175…

a few months ago in an interview, someone asked me where we wanted to take the codex app. i answered with something along the lines of: we intend to make it the best app ever built for desktop, full stop. it probably felt like a little much, but i meant it. and it feels less potentially hyperbolic now than it did then. Codex is the best way to build software. it is now the best way to do many other things too. we will lean into both, and much of it will mean we blend a lot with ChatGPT. we will do this only when we can deliver something incredible and better than what the two separate current things can deliver alone. we will also combine the best parts of cloud and local environments (and yes, windows linux). and the best of instant responses and long-running objectives, like /goal. we will do so with Taste™ outside of the incredible gpt models, 3 things have made the Codex app what it is: - an opinionated view of how agents should work with a high quality bar - a tight and honest dogfooding loop - you those 3 things will continue to be P0. LFG.

I went to BJ's Restaurant last night with my kids. The bathroom was disgusting. The front of house was kind but sloppy and slow. The food upset my stomach and I woke up at 4am this morning because of it. Whoever BJ is, they probably aren't a real person, because everyone acted like nobody's name is on the door. I studied the management history of BJ's. The original founders left after the seventh location. Then it was sold to their accountants. Then it went public. Then the CEO resigned last year after 19 years and was replaced by an interim board member from Darden Restaurants, who was then replaced by a "Chief Concept Officer" promoted to CEO. The CFO also quit. Roaches behind the takeout counter in Coral Springs. Rodent droppings and mold in the ice machine in Pembroke Pines. An "F" retention score on Comparably. Glassdoor reviews that say "management turnover is high... that should say quite a bit about the company culture." Seven layers of management between the person cooking your food and anyone who owns the outcome. General manager reports to area director reports to regional director reports to regional VP reports to SVP of Operations reports to the COO (who started in January) reports to the CEO (who started last year). 218 locations. Founders long gone. Managers rotate every 18 months. The kitchen is run by compliance checklists, not pride. A dirty bathroom is nobody's personal failure because it's nobody's personal restaurant. This is the stewardship crisis in America in one building. In Chinese restaurants, the 老板 (laoban) is there. He tastes the food. He watches the kitchen. His family's reputation is the business. The restaurant is clean not because of health inspectors but because his name is on it. Haidilao built a $30B hot pot chain with less than 10% employee turnover. Servers can give you free dishes without asking a manager. Why? Because they're treated like stewards, not interchangeable parts. The West replaced stewardship with professional management. MBAs who optimize spreadsheets for people they've never met. CEOs who've never touched the product they sell. Politicians who sign the bills and spend the people's money but never checked the money built anything that helped the people they claimed to care about. Founder mode isn't new. It's the oldest idea in Chinese business culture. We just forgot it. The best founders I fund at YC are natural stewards. They own the outcome. They're in the kitchen tasting the food. They care about the bathroom. Most of society's problems are a stewardship crisis. Not a lack of resources or technology or intelligence. A lack of people who give a shit because their name is on it.

We are seeing strong traction and working to improve Codex for scientists across mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology and more. What do you wish it were capable of that it cannot do today?

Are you a scientist or researcher and have tried codex? What do you wish it could do?

Codex for everything: - Dynamic UI for the task at hand - 20% faster computer & browser use - Even better slides and sheets - Annotate in browser, artifacts, and code - Easier to get started - Cleaner design across the app - Performance improvements - (no clunky handoff/switching)

embers

We’ve started adding some Prism like features into the Codex app. Your feedback would be appreciated 🙏

fun bonus: we shipped a .tex plugin

GPT-5.5, not fully saturating the TikZ unicorn test yet but getting awfully close ... (yes this is actual TikZ code, I personally find it so unbelievable that I'm putting the code below for anyone to verify for themself)

New in the Codex app: - GPT-5.5 - Browser control - Sheets & Slides - Docs & PDFs - OS-wide dictation - Auto-review mode Enjoy!

The @OpenAI Codex codebase is unsurprisingly the best codebase for Codex to write code in. 🤯

Met @Jason randomly by crashing his event in SF a few weeks ago.

Not true. Prism has joined Codex and we will continue to invest in the experience for researchers and build delightful tools to help advance science.

We’re continuing to support Prism in the near term, and users should not expect any immediate loss of access. For any future changes, we’ll communicate clearly in advance and make sure users have a thoughtful migration path.

Thank you for everything you did for the team and being an early advocate getting us to the point where it’s commonplace that ai models are contributing to novel science!

This is a great take. Human intelligence and computer intelligence are not different points on a line, but in a high dimensional space—and we should explore more of the space.

Btw: @hemal built this as a simple skill in a few hours, since Prism is powered by Codex. More to come. And if you love the idea of building AI-native products to accelerate science, we're hiring a lead designer for Prism: apply here! jobs.ashbyhq.com/openai/7e26…

💥 New in Prism today: Paper Review, an AI workflow for reviewing technical and scientific papers. This is the opposite of AI slop: we're using AI to improve scientific rigor, correctness, and reproducibility.

In a beautiful recent paper, Vishesh Jain and Clayton Mizgerd used GPT-5.4 Pro to prove a striking result in the theory of Markov chains: arxiv.org/pdf/2604.03937 They study the adjacent transposition Markov chain on the symmetric group. A conjecture of Fill, recently settled by Greaves and Zhu, determined which parameters of this chain maximize the spectral gap, a natural quantity controlling how fast the chain mixes. Jain and Mizgerd go further and characterize exactly when this extremal spectral gap is achieved, answering another question of Fill. As they explain in the paper, once the first part was in place, GPT-5.4 Pro was able to one-shot generate the second part of the main result. From talking with the authors, my understanding is that this would likely have taken substantial effort without GPT. Furthermore even given the first part, several ingredients, such as the piecewise eigenvector construction in Proposition 6.6, were new to them. Just another example of how AI is already changing the everyday practice of research mathematics.