Launch HN: Miyagi (YC W25) turns YouTube videos into online, interactive courses
I was at Coursera for years and pitched this exact thing multiple times internally! So excited to finally see it being built. Congratulations on the launch!
This concept is really cool and solves big challenges around content creation. Obviously, it adds new challenges around pedagogy, licensing, and ads. The last part is a big no no for blue chip edtech platforms.
Really cool idea! Some improvements I'd recommend with the ultimate goal being "getting users to learn the subject at hand".
1) Section Lectures on the left side need to be cleaned up, instead of just a numbered list. Seeing 30+ lectures off rip is a bit daunting, especially with no labeling, sectioning, etc. I'd imagine feeding a model a list of all the lecture titles, then having it structured should work?
2) You're doing too much on the bottom section.
You need to incorporate all those tabs into the single Ai tutor, which can run whatever tools required (maybe notes/discussion can be a small additional indication). No one's going to be using the Flashcards section, and it's calling probably the same LLM as the AI tutor, so might as well combine them.
For the quiz, maybe when the video ends or the user wants to continue, the Ai Tutor goes into "quiz mode" forcing the user to attempt or pass the quiz (depending on the settings?).
Think of this like Cursor but for Education. Cursors powerful agent can handle/do so much, you're not using 3-4 different fields.
Oh and have it on the right side instead of transcript, so it's right there in users faces instead of having to scroll down.
I am very interested in this, and I have personally built manual workflows to do Youtube video -> rip audio->transcript->llm context.
For example, taking a video about building garden retaining walls and generating detailed system prompts for Q&A with the expert in the video.
I reference ~home improvement or tool videos and often comments contain points of wisdom or even corrections of mistakes (errata) on videos that are otherwise good. For example, setting up a hand plane and ways to mark a board you're working on.
Do you use video comments in your context? I've (manually) scraped content on educational videos and built prompting to assess signal and incorporate what are likely important errata in LLM context.
> video/resource —> transcript/text —>
For this step in your pipeline, are you multi-modal? I mean, are you using the LLM to interpret what is shown in the video itself? How is that content used?
Do you have any sense for allowing people to generate educational content off arbitrary videos?
This is a fun concept, and I love the name!
I’m curious why you didn’t use multiple choice for the exercises? I feel like those would be easier than typing out full answers and be closer to MOOC style homework. Maybe have a longer written question at the end of a section.
The exercises work pretty well, I like the highlighting red wrong vs. green right. It does feel a bit like the MOOC-style discussions. The tutor doesn’t just tell you the answers which is cool, but something about talking with the tutor feels a bit flat. And the flashcards weren’t very helpful for the course I picked.
I could see myself doing some courses like this with some more gamification. Being able to filter by course provider (Ycombinator, or MIT) would be cool too.
Miyagi is a pretty nice name to give!
For anyone else interested in Bloom's 2-sigma, here's the original paper (1984): https://web.mit.edu/5.95/readings/bloom-two-sigma.pdf
Blows my mind that 1:1 tutoring dwarfs the impact of other factors such as socioeconomic status, reinforcement, assigned homework, classroom morale, etc (at least according to the researchers).
Does anyone know if this thesis has been replicated? Or if these results hold in modern times (original study was 40 years ago)?
Can you extend this into language learning content on YT? I think that would also have amazing utility. As a biologist, so happy to see Crime Pays but Botany doesn't on here. Thanks for the awesome tool. I will be using it.
This is really cool!
Prof. Steve Brunton's YT channel is a treasure trove of material for you folks, with course-like playlists for controls, data-driven engineering, and dynamical systems: https://www.youtube.com/@Eigensteve/playlists
He should be a featured creator, much like 3b1b is for math!
Instead of direct trivia from the content, it would be helpful to have an exercise (with evaluation) that applies the content learnt - a small artifact production with real-world practical use.
Imagine you would need, another ai pipeline that poses as the consumer and applier of the knowledge, instead of a direct processor ai of content information as it currently seems.
Nice work! How do you verify correctness of the generated exercises and explanations? To me this looks the biggest risk in becoming a user: what if my _teacher_ teaches me subtle nonsense that I cannot easily detect since I'm learning and unfamiliar with the material (even if it's only in the 1-2% of cases)? Human teachers make mistakes too, but an LLM cannot _understand_ that it made one... So.. how do you solve for this issue of trust?
Seems to actually work! Thanks for sharing, I'll be checking it out.
Just wanna say that this is one of those magical ideas that I'd never personally think of, but when I see it like this, it makes perfect sense! So cool.
Congratulations on the launch guys! Was interested in such a product for a long time. I think adding social collaboration would be a game changer for a tool like this. Imagine people being able to start their own cohorts to learn and keeping each other accountable. Looking forward!!
I think this is a great idea. I’ve learned so much on YouTube but it’s always been in small chunks and very task oriented. I imagine there’s a lot of content Which covers broad topics that I don’t come across.
Something I’ve been doing more and more lately is asking chatgpt to create a detailed description of a topic which can be read aloud for whatever duration I plan on driving. This works exceptionally well - even for short 5 minute drives.
I wonder if the same can be done for video-based content. Sometimes I’m short on time but still want to learn something.
Poker, specifically Texas No Limit Hold'em, is widely taught on Youtube.
Here are some of the very best in the category, it would be really cool if you partnered with any of these.
https://www.youtube.com/@hungryhorsepoker
I work in edtech and one of my teams is content creation, so pretty excited about this space but also very aware of the challenges and massive amounts of hype and over promise / under deliver. To assess I tried to generate a short (< 10m), one-video course from a YT video I've previously watched on a topic I'm an "expert" - after an hour all I see is the embedded video, the transcript and "generating content" dialog.
UPDATE: " This course failed to generate. Please try again or contact us."
I really like a lot of the components of your idea, but the execution is underwhelming. Right now it feels like you're providing middling tools for too many components without nailing any of them. Alternatively I could watch the YT video at all ready has a transcript, take notes in any tool, and ask questions to any LLM; the piece missing is context, so that's where it feels like you should focus.
Re: assessments; it feels like you're being distracted here; I'm not convinced that's how your natural target market learns in this modality. We generate quizes in our product, but it's typically used in the "internal compliance" segment - think mandatory training like food safety for food preparers - not the external (typically adult) self-improvement market (which is huge!). If you're going to do asessments you need a lot of non-AI boilerplate around tracking, validation and certification/credentials. My two cents: quizes in your app are a cool demo feature with little real value.
Does it work on YouTube videos that have transcripts disabled?
I hope you view a YouTube ad on that video every time the course is opened otherwise it’s a self defeating system.
Do you have any revenue sharing program with the content creators? Or are you just poaching them?
Neat idea! Do you do anything with the video itself? Understand the visual content or extract details from slides?
Are the people that create the content okay with this?
Shout out to Crime Pays but Botany Doesn't :)
How censored is the "AI Tutor"? can a parent leave their child with it unsupervised?
Amazing approach! Is learning a second language too different from the types of courses Miyagi was designed for, or do you see a potential for that category?
How do you validate you’re not generating garbage, and thus teaching people nonsense?
How worried are you about platform risk?
Does the list of resources simply need to be a list of links to video objects?
this is super interesting would love to give it a try!
Great idea! Automated quiz generation seems like a nice use case for LLMs.
The tech looks cool.
But it does seem that your platform ingests video content without the permission of the person who creates these videos? The value of your platform is driven by the people creating the videos. You say that you do revenue sharing, and that you have done 5 partnerships. But you have 400 courses, so what about the other 395?
Putting it as kindly as I can: this is ethically fraught. Really, did nobody in the room point this out? You do not come off looking like a partner here.
You need to make this opt-in, not opt-out, and specify revenue sharing terms up front. Those terms need to be generous. The people who produce video content are producing the majority of your product's value. Opt-out, of an ambiguous revenue sharing agreement, is not enough.
Bro this is dope. I want to use neetcode 150 to practice/study interview problems
No python course?
Congrats on launch
Nice work! Really cool.
Great concept!
Good Stuff!
Nice App. Another similar one is You learn ai.
This is awesome! Congrats Tyrone & Guang!
Your app is simply awesome. I've playing with it for a bit and I can see how this approach would make traditional homework much more engaging. Also, the LLM doesn't care about the language used in the responses, so my understanding is that localizing the content in different languages would be very straightforward.
This is, I think, particularly important for kids in most parts of the world as a majority of the internet pedagogical content is English-based. Or for people like me, that struggle with that language when talking about topics outside the tech industry.
Congrats for your project, I'm sure we share the same positive view about the future of learning :)