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AI models like GPT-5 are an increasingly valuable tool for scientists, but many remain unaware of the capabilities of frontier AI. We present a collection of short case studies in which GPT-5 produced new, concrete steps in ongoing research across mathematics, physics, astronomy, computer science, biology, and materials science. In these examples, the authors highlight how AI accelerated their work, and where it fell short; where expert time was saved, and where human input was still key. We document the interactions of the human authors with GPT-5, as guiding examples of fruitful collaboration with AI. Of note, this paper includes four new results in mathematics (carefully verified by the human authors), underscoring how GPT-5 can help human mathematicians settle previously unsolved problems. These contributions are modest in scope but profound in implication, given the rate at which frontier AI is progressing. 

Text data has become extremely valuable due to the emergence of machine learning algorithms that learn from it. A lot of high-quality text data generated in the real world is private and therefore cannot be shared or used freely due to privacy concerns. Generating synthetic replicas of private text data with a formal privacy guarantee, i.e., differential privacy (DP), offers a promising and scalable solution. However, existing methods necessitate DP finetuning of large language models (LLMs) on private data to generate DP synthetic data. This approach is not viable for proprietary LLMs (e.g., GPT-3.5) and also demands considerable computational resources for open-source LLMs. Lin et al. (2024) recently introduced the Private Evolution (PE) algorithm to generate DP synthetic images with only API access to diffusion models. In this work, we propose an augmented PE algorithm, named AUGPE, that applies to the complex setting of text. We use API access to an LLM and generate DP synthetic text without any model training. We conduct comprehensive experiments on three benchmark datasets. Our results demonstrate that AUGPE produces DP synthetic text that yields competitive utility with the SOTA DP finetuning baselines. This underscores the feasibility of relying solely on API access of LLMs to produce high-quality DP synthetic texts, thereby facilitating more accessible routes to privacy-preserving LLM applications. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/AI-secure/aug-pe. 

We study the convergence rate of discretized Riemannian Hamiltonian Monte Carlo on sampling from distributions in the form of e^{−f(x)} on a convex body M ⊂ R^n. We show that for distributions in the form of e−^{a x} on a polytope with m constraints, the convergence rate of a family of commonly-used integrators is independent of ∥a∥_2 and the geometry of the polytope. In particular, the implicit midpoint method (IMM) and the generalized Leapfrog method (LM) have a mixing time of mn^3 to achieve ϵ total variation distance to the target distribution. These guarantees are based on a general bound on the convergence rate for densities of the form e^{−f(x)} in terms of parameters of the manifold and the integrator. Our theoretical guarantee complements the empirical results of our old result, which shows that RHMC with IMM can sample ill-conditioned, non-smooth and constrained distributions in very high dimension efficiently in practice.