Each chapter in the paper offers case studies: a mathematician or a physicist stuck in a quandary, a doctor trying to confirm a lab result. They all ask GPT-5 for help. Sometimes the LLM gets things wrong. Sometimes it finds a faster route to an already known result. But other times, with careful human guidance, it helps push the boundaries of what was previously known.
In one experiment involving how waves behave around black holes, GPT-5 worked through the math to independently produce results that had previously been shown to be correct, showing it was capable of doing this level of scientific calculation. In another project involving nuclear fusion, GPT-5 developed a model that accelerated the research.