Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
Hi HN, we are Sina Atalay and Abdullah Geduk, co-founders of Academa. We are both PhD students. We thought: what if lecture videos were written as code and compiled into video using computer graphics and TTS? Then LLMs could write them, and lectures could be fixed with code edits instead of video production. On correctness: LLMs may make mistakes. But these videos are code sitting in our repository, and we can maintain them. Every report and review becomes a fix in the source, and everyone who watches after that gets the corrected lecture. Every recorded lecture on the internet is stuck with its mistakes. Ours will continuously improve. Each video also comes with an AI chat that understands everything said and shown in the lecture. There is a longer write-up at the bottom of the page. Happy to answer any questions.
Discussion Highlights (11 comments)
bananaflag
What LLMs are you using?
jamienk
There are misplaced verbal emphasis and non-emphasis. And unfortunately these happen at the crucial moments. Makes it very hard to follow.
davisp
> On correctness: LLMs may make mistakes. But these videos are code sitting in our repository, and we can maintain them. Every report and review becomes a fix in the source, and everyone who watches after that gets the corrected lecture. Every recorded lecture on the internet is stuck with its mistakes. Ours will continuously improve. Models change. Models are unpredictable. The assumption that we can constrain them between prompt bumpers has not been proven and seems unlikely to be provable given how these model works. Beyond that, how do you know if the reports and reviews are even correct? Are you just gonna rely on the kindness of others to provide that value? Of all things that LLM’s have killed, I’m pretty sure the open sharing of knowledge and understanding are the first on the chopping block. I don’t care whether or not you’re pro or anti LLM, publishing knowledge for reputation is now a dead end for anyone wanting to make a living. Wrapping others’ knowledge in a black box that may or may not accurately represent that knowledge is basically enshitification on steroids. The reason we hold folks like Lovelace, Sagan, or Feynman in high regard is because they weren’t wrong when they shared their understanding and knowledge. But the best of luck to everyone involved! I’m sure everything will work out!
Saltloaf
Love the 'videos as code' idea! Imagine quickly iterating on explanations or generating variations for different learning styles.
not_a_hacker123
This is a great idea. I find LLMs to be a good teacher, though I've primarily interacted with them through text. I'm curious, what are the economics of producing this longer form content?
richard_chase
Why do I need to use this? Why can't I just use the LLMs directly to generate lectures if I want?
folkrav
To me, the main advantage of the lecture format is the possibility to have me or others grill the lecturer for questions, benefiting the whole group. From this point of view, a video of a lecture is already a compromise. In both cases, it's always kind of a tedium unless the lecturer is a good and entertaining communicator. I'm not sure listening to a robot reading me a transcript and chatting with it really gives me those same advantages. What's the upside to this versus just getting slides and/or transcript w/ sources and feeding it to my own LLM?
fen_wick
Fellow PhD student here, always wished for easier ways to update lecture content. This "code to video" idea could be huge for reproducibility.
regnull
Great idea, but buggy. My lecture started mid-sentence and ended abruptly (Kalman filter). Looking forward to when you guys get it working well. Also, I'm curious if the lecture description language is public.
bigblind
i find the writing style a bit peculiar at times. Take this lecture on bloom filters for example: https://academa.ai/lectures/bloom-filters It suddenly starts talking about URLs, but it never really sets up the idea that we're using some kind of URL lookup service as an example. The way it introduces the memory limit feels similarly strange. At some point, it just says that we have 8GB of memory, but it does that halfway through the explanation, not as part of the setup of the problem we're actually solving.
Cycl0ps
I watched the linear regression video. I can see the value behind the idea, but there's a number of flaws that make the videos difficult to watch compared to something like a 3blue1brown video. The flat voice and even word spacing lull you into zoning out, right until a mispronunciation jolts you back. The idea of using LLMs to write out a script and storyboard for the video is interesting, but I think it needs intermediary work to better instruct the speech and graphics on how to perform.