This is a blog post I've been looking forward to writing. Just for the delight of it. I wrote a few weeks ago about OpenAI's new science editor Prism.
On the back of that Sam from https://www.underleaf.ai reached out to me. I'd not known about Underleaf before.
From Sam's own words
On the back of that Sam from https://www.underleaf.ai reached out to me. I'd not known about Underleaf before.
From Sam's own words
I started building it in late 2024 because I thought LaTeX work was still far more manual than it should be, especially for researchers, students (like I was a few years prior), and professors who regularly have to write in LaTeX and convert their handwritten math, PDFs, figures, tables, and diagrams into clean LaTeX. A lot of that work is tedious and time-consuming even though it is fairly structured, so the goal with Underleaf has been to leverage LLMs - which I've found excel at this class of task - to make those workflows dramatically faster.
And it does just what it says on the tin, you write your maths notes by hand, and then an LLM turns those notes into LaTeX. And it just seems to work.
When we write by hand we use different parts of our brain's and I can recall clearly when I was learning physics many years ago the feeling of unpacking the meaning in the equations, just through playing around with them, on paper. If just feels kind of right.
TeX was born of wanting to have a typesetting system as elegant as hand written mathematics, and for many folk becoming fluid in writhing TeX/LaTeX became a skill in itself, but I love that someone has built something that is a perfect encapsulation of what LLM powered technologies can do, nice job Sam!
Sam is
focused on helping people go from raw inputs (i.e. handwritten notes, screenshots, or photos of chalkboards) to clean, usable LaTeX much more quickly. Some of the most popular tools are PDF to LaTeX, image to LaTeX, and image to TikZ, and we have some other utility tools that help with tables, diagrams, and technical writing workflows (as well as a [Chrome extension](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/underleaf-ai-dark-mode-fo/kkapknfgmppfnheehjfbkcbnmginepcc) that integrates directly into Overleaf).
I promised Sam weeks ago that I would post about it, so I'm really glad to have been able to sit down for a few minutes and share this awesome tool with you all.
