Can Grok Outperform ChatGPT? Grok's New Feature:Generate PDFs with a Single Command, It's Quite Impressive!
Can Grok Outperform ChatGPT? Grok's New Feature: Generate PDFs with a Single Command, It's Quite Impressive!
Grok Studio, Workspace, Memory, video/voice mode, and now the PDF rendering feature we're going to talk about today - xAI, which seems to be on a roll, keeps coming up with new tricks. Its "money - power" is remarkable when it shows up.
If you've ever typeset a thesis using Word, you surely understand that adjusting line spacing, changing fonts, editing icons, and aligning references is even more troublesome than writing the thesis itself. Later, you learned LaTeX, thinking you could handle formatting gracefully from then on, but then you got stuck in the endless loop of \begin{table}
and \end{equation}
, and even inserting an image required writing several lines of code.
Now, Grok simply tells you: Stop typesetting, I'll do it.
Yes, during the May Day holiday, Elon Musk's Grok launched a new feature: directly generating PDFs.
With just a few simple conversations, it can write content, format it, and package it into a PDF. There's no need to install Word, open Overleaf, or even use Adobe Acrobat. It's a one - step - to - the - end solution.
This new feature in Grok Studio is officially called PDF Rendering, which focuses on "quickly generating PDFs with a single command". All you need to do is clearly state your requirements in the input box. For example: Generate a modern resume in PDF format, including educational background, project experience, and skill tags.
Grok will then automatically open Studio, start generating content and formatting it, and within 20 seconds, produce a beautifully designed and downloadable PDF file.
The PDF rendering feature is currently in the Beta preview stage and is available to both free and paid users. (Here, we give a big thumbs - up to the generous Elon Musk.) From the experience, Grok's PDF generation is really something. Let's take a look at several practical usage scenarios.
For academic enthusiasts, LaTeX formatting is an inevitable topic. With Grok, this becomes a breeze. For example, Generate a PDF paper on the evolution of the Transformer architecture. Grok directly outputs a PDF close to the arXiv standard format, complete with an abstract, formulas, and references.
The Evolution of the Transformer Architecture: From Inception to Modern Variants
May 2025
Abstract
The Transformer architecture, introduced in 2017, has revolutionized natural language processing and extended its impact to fields like computer vision and reinforcement learning. This paper traces the evolution of the Transformer, from its original design to modern variants that enhance efficiency, scalability, and performance. We discuss key milestones, including the introduction of BERT, GPT, Vision Transformers, and sparse attention mechanisms, while highlighting challenges and future directions. This comprehensive review aims to provide researchers with a clear understanding of the Transformer's development and its transformative potential.
1 Introduction
The Transformer architecture, first proposed by (author) [1], marked a paradigm shift in sequence modeling by replacing recurrent neural networks with a fully attention - based framework. Its self - attention mechanism enabled parallel processing, improved long - range dependency modeling, and set new benchmarks in tasks like machine translation. Since its inception, the Transformer has evolved significantly, giving rise to specialized variants tailored for diverse applications.
This paper provides a systematic review of the Transformer's evolution, covering its foundational principles, major adaptations, and emerging trends. We aim to elucidate how architectural innovations have addressed limitations such as computational complexity and context length, while exploring the architecture's expanding role beyond natural language processing (NLP).
2 The Original Transformer
The Transformer as introduced in the seminal paper "Attention is All You Need" [1], consists of an encoder - decoder structure designed for sequence - to - sequence tasks. Its key innovation is the self - attention mechanism, which computes pairwise interactions between input tokens to capture contextual relationships.
2.1 Self - Attention Mechanism
The self - attention mechanism computes a weighted sum of input embeddings, where weights are derived from the similarity between query, key, and value vectors. Formally, for an input sequence X ∈ Rnxd, the scaled dot - product attention is defined as:
$Attention(Q, K, V)=softmax\left(\frac{Q K^{T}}{\sqrt{d_{k}}}\right) V$ where Q, K, and V are query, key, and value matrices, and d_a is the dimension of the keys. The scaling factor √d_k mitigates vanishing gradients for large dimensions.
2.2 Multi - Head Attention
To capture diverse relationships, the Transformer employs multi - head attention, where attention is computed in parallel across ℏ heads and concatenated:
$MultiHead(Q, K, V)= Concat \left( head _{1},..., head _{h}\right) W^{O}$
$where head _{i}=Attention\left(Q W_{i}^{Q}, K W_{i}^{K}, V W_{i}^{V}\right).$
2.3 Positional Encoding
Since Transformers lack sequential bias, positional encodings are added to token embeddings to encode order information. The original paper used fixed sinusoidal functions:
$P E_{(pos, 2i)}=sin \left(\frac{pos}{1000^{2i / d}}\right), P E_{(pos, 2i + 1)}=cos \left(\frac{pos}{10000^{2i / d}}\right)$
3 Major Milestones in Transformer Evolution
The Transformer's flexibility has led to numerous adaptations, each addressing specific challenges or targeting new domains.
3.1 BERT: Bidirectional Contextual Understanding
Introduced by (author?) [2], BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) leveraged the Transformer encoder for bidirectional context modeling. Trained on masked language modeling and next - sentence prediction tasks, BERT achieved state - of - the - art results on NLP benchmarks like GLUE. Its bidirectional nature contrasted with unidirectional models, enabling richer contextual representations.
Apart from academic papers, Grok can also help working professionals create PDF resumes. For example, Generate a single - page resume in PDF format with a modern and aesthetically pleasing style, including skill lists, project experiences, and educational background.
Your Name [email protected] |+123 - 456 - 7890 |linkedin.comin/yourprofile | github. com/yourgithub
Skills
· Programming Languages: Python, JavaScript, Java, C++
·Frameworks & Tools: React, Node.js, Django, Git, Docker
·Databases: MySQL, MongoDB, PostgreSQL
·Other: Machine Learning, Cloud Computing (AWS), Agile Methodologies
Project Experience
Personal Finance Web App
Jan 2024 - Jun 2024
·Developed a full - stack web application using React and Django to help users track expenses and set budgets.
· Implemented secure user authentication and real - time data visualization with Chart.js.
·Deployed the application on AWS, achieving 99.9% uptime and handling 1,000+ monthly users.
Machine Learning Image Classifier
Aug 2023 - Dec 2023
· Built a convolutional neural network using TensorFlow to classify images with 95% accuracy.
·Optimized model performance through hyperparameter tuning and data augmentation.
· Presented findings to a team of 10 researchers, leading to adoption in a larger Al project.
Education
Or you can create a PDF version of a restaurant menu. For example, Create a PDF restaurant menu themed around Elon Musk and Donald Trump. Grok's response is quite interesting.
I will use LaTeX to create a PDF restaurant menu themed around Elon Musk and Donald Trump. The menu will adopt a mixed - style of English and Chinese, highlighting the iconic features of the two figures. The menu will include appetizers, main courses, desserts, and beverages, with an elegant design suitable for restaurants. Since Chinese support is required, I will use the XeLaTeX engine and select the Noto Serif CJK SC font to ensure correct Chinese display.
Here is the full - version PDF menu:
Musk & Trump Themed Restaurant Menu | A Gastronomic Journey of Innovation and Boldness / A Journey of Innovation and Boldness |
---|---|
Appetizers | Starship Starter ¥88 Roasted lettuce wraps with Martian chili sauce, symbolizing Elon's interstellar exploration dreams. Golden Trump Tower ¥98 Mini gold - foiled sandwiches filled with lobster and caviar, demonstrating Trump's luxurious style. |
Main Courses | Tesla Power Plate ¥188 Slow - roasted steak with electric blueberry sauce, representing Tesla's energy revolution. Trump's Victory Burger ¥168 Oversized Angus beef burger with fries and a special "Winner" sauce, showing great boldness. |
Desserts | Neuralink Pie Y68 A chocolate - hazelnut pie with rich layers, resembling Elon's AI dreams. Presidential Crown Y78 Golden caramel pudding decorated with edible gold leaf, embodying Trump's regal demeanor. |
Beverages | Starship Fuel ¥48 Blue electric lemonade soda, energizing and paying tribute to SpaceX's space journey. Trump's Classic ¥58 Luxurious gold - rimmed iced tea with honey and citrus, symbolizing uncompromising taste. |
If you're not satisfied with the PDF generated at once, there are two ways to modify it.
The easiest way is to continue the conversation and clearly state your requirements to Grok. For example, if you think the above - mentioned menu has good content but lacks aesthetic appeal and is too plain, Grok can optimize it.
The second method requires a bit of hands - on ability - directly modifying the LaTeX code. Yes, Grok's entire PDF rendering feature is implemented based on LaTeX code. You can click the Code
button in the upper - left corner of Grok Studio to view the code details, and it also supports real - time modification and preview.
In fact, Grok is not the first AI tool to launch the "direct PDF generation" feature. ChatGPT supported generating PDFs long before Grok. However, ChatGPT uses Python's third - party libraries to output PDFs, which is far less smooth than Grok and often encounters errors. In terms of typesetting, aesthetics, and user - friendliness, they are not in the same league. With the same prompt, ChatGPT encountered multiple errors when generating PDF documents.
for section, items in menu.items():
pdf.section_title(section)
for name, desc in items:
pdf.menu_item(name, desc)
# Save PDF
pdf_path ="/mnt/data/Musk_Trump_Diner_Menu.pdf"
pdf.output(pdf_path)
pdf_path
Currently, due to the high frequency of generation requests, my system is temporarily unable to create PDF files.
Suggested temporary solution: I have prepared plain - text menu content that can be directly imported into Word/Google Docs for typesetting. The typesetting is good, and it is suitable for you to export as a PDF by yourself. You just need to click the button below to copy and then paste it into your preferred document tool to export the PDF.
Conclusion
In the past, creating a beautiful PDF was a technical task. Now, it only takes one sentence. Content, format, and output are all done in one step.