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Details
- OpenAI has released FrontierScience, an evaluation suite targeting PhD-level reasoning across physics, chemistry, and biology.
- The benchmark includes both olympiad-style problems and in-depth research prompts to mimic real scientific problem-solving.
- Latest tests show GPT-5.2 leading the benchmark, surpassing both earlier GPT-5 and GPT-4 in tackling complex, structured questions.
- OpenAI partnered with Red Queen Bio to conduct a controlled experiment where GPT-5 was tasked with optimizing a molecular cloning protocol, resulting in improved laboratory efficiency compared to previous methods.
- FrontierScience is intended as a guiding metric, alongside real-world lab tests, driving future work to enhance experimental reasoning capabilities in AI models.
- OpenAI acknowledges ongoing challenges in areas like hypothesis generation and error management, highlighting active research on next-gen scientific AI agents.
- The announcement, made on December 16, 2025, is positioned within a broader strategy to use AI as a tool to accelerate and democratize scientific discovery.
Impact
This move pushes industry rivals such as Anthropic, DeepMind, and Meta to broaden their focus beyond textbook benchmarks and into domain-specific scientific reasoning. By tying AI performance to real lab outcomes, OpenAI is setting a higher standard for both credibility and utility in scientific AI, likely influencing regulatory views and shaping investment trends in biotech automation.
