The scales are still low — with 1.3 million users discussing «advanced hard science,» and an average of 8.3 million weekly messages on the topics.
To put this into perspective, an October, 2025, survey from OpenAI said that 0.15% of ChatGPT users engaged in conversations on self-harm and suicide, or roughly 1.2 million customers.
Small field, but big gains
People who identify as scientists only account for about 0.1% of the global population, however.
— We’re still early, but the pace of adoption and the quality of the work suggest science is entering a new acceleration phase, says Kevin Weil, VP of OpenAI for Science.
The «hard science» topic does seem to be growing fast, at a rate of 47% during the whole of 2025.
Judges from the International Olympiad on Astronomy and Astrophysics found GPT-5 to be good enough for genuine scientific reasoning, but not fully suitable yet as co-scientist on research papers. That was also in October.
This, though, is rapidly changing with the advance of new models.
Read more: The OpenAI report, and Axios.