Special announcement: Introducing GRAIL, an agentic LaTex editor for vibe science

It's time we brought science writing to the 21st century. For LaTex aficionados, we bring you GRAIL.

For many of you following our substack, the formula is simple: we pick a paper, typically from the arXiv preprint server, cover it so you get the gist of it in a few minutes, and then post.

But how do those original papers get written in the first place? It wouldn’t surprise you to know that many people use AI a lot for that, but it might surprise you to know that it still takes days and weeks to do so - even with ChatGPT. Computer science and math papers are written in LaTex, a typesetting language that has to be compiled into a PDF. While there are SaaS platforms now (such as Overleaf) for doing so, you have to copy-paste from ChatGPT - or your favorite chatbot - into Overleaf, compile, re-copy, re-paste, and on and on.

We’ve encountered this problem before, and the solution to this is now evident: vibe-coding. Cursor works so well because it makes writing entire reams of code so seamless. Just prompt and watch the program get written and compiled with minimal clicking. We asked: can we do the same for LaTex?

We think the answer is yes, and we created GRAIL. While we intend for GRAIL to be nothing short of an AI-native platform for modern science, we are starting with an agentic LaTex editor. Just like Cursor, GRAIL allows you to start with rough notes and thoughts and vibe-write your way to fully formatted PDF papers. No more copy-pasting between chatbots and LaTex editors, figuring out compilation errors, losing context along the way…you name it.

GRAIL is built by scientists, for scientists. We launched a day after OpenAI’s PRISM, but people who have been using both tell us that GRAIL offers a much smoother experience. Both are free, and we believe both will be useful for different people and different needs. But GRAIL is not built by Big Tech or ‘Big Frontier’, and we are not in this for anything other than the advancement of science.

With 150 musings behind us, we hope that you will trust us enough to give GRAIL a try right here. It won’t take you more than a few minutes, and if you’re a LaTex user, we want you to have a delightful experience that will make science writing fun again. In either case, we want to hear from you and we can’t wait to see what you create with it.

We are all-in on the vibe science movement, and we’re only getting started. We hope you will join us to drive exponential improvements in science at 10x the speed as before!