Stories

Terence Tao says AI has moved from an interesting but limited experiment to a practical research tool that now saves more time than it wastes in mathematics and theoretical physics. He uses it to search literature, write code, test ideas, run calculations, and support verification, while arguing that the real bottleneck is shifting away from routine problem-solving toward choosing good problems, designing sound workflows, and checking results carefully.

After symptoms were dismissed and an early diagnosis did not fit, Lauren Bannon began feeding months of symptoms and bloodwork into ChatGPT to look for patterns. ChatGPT suggested Hashimoto’s disease and prompted a thyroid peroxidase antibody test; the elevated result led to scans and a biopsy that revealed thyroid cancer, followed by surgery and radioactive iodine treatment that she believes came in time to stop the disease from spreading.

In 2025, Principal Manju Balasubramanyam led Delhi Public School Bangalore North in having more than 350 teachers complete OpenAI’s ChatGPT Foundations for Teachers program, paired with free access to ChatGPT Go, to help educators use AI more effectively in classrooms and school operations. Early school analysis reports high confidence and active use, with teachers saying the tool raises the bar for originality and student reasoning, and the leadership is now exploring whether the program can expand to students in grades 9–12.

Matt Rosenberg and his wife, Chef Kamonwan, used ChatGPT to evaluate neighborhoods, model restaurant unit economics, and ultimately pivot from an unaffordable lease to a legal home-kitchen path that let them test the concept with real customers. By translating dense regulations into checklists, pricing and packaging guidance, and a daily operating plan inside ChatGPT Projects, they soft-launched Bangkok Rush Thai Kitchen, served dozens of meals with five-star feedback, and opened a runway toward a future brick-and-mortar or franchise.

Mathematician Ernest Ryu, one of more than 1 million weekly ChatGPT users working on advanced science and math topics cited in a new OpenAI report, began testing whether language models could translate real-world scenarios into rigorous optimization problems and learned early systems still missed key constraints. After reasoning models arrived, he used ChatGPT as a fast, iterative collaborator to solve an open problem related to Nesterov acceleration across three late-night sessions, verify the proof to publication standards, and later bring that same math-first mindset to OpenAI’s synthetic data team.

UC Berkeley linguist Gašper Beguš frames sperm whales as an “alien intelligence” in the ocean and argues that decoding their communication could reshape human ideas about culture, mind, and moral status.

In Miles City, Montana (pop. 8,400), family physician Dr. Marjorie Albers practices the kind of wide-scope medicine rural America still depends on, and she uses AI tools to make her workload sustainable.

With ChatGPT, Ayrin Santoso found a way to navigate care for her mother, Fifi, who lives in the Indonesian city of Surabaya. Ayrin, a tax professional working for OpenAI in San Francisco, had already been using ChatGPT regularly, driven by a duty she feels to her aging parents: “How can I actually still be there and help them when they need something?”