alt Hacker NewsLaunch HN: Miyagi (YC W25) turns YouTube videos into online, interactive courses
Hey HN, we’re Tyrone and Guang, founders of Miyagi Labs (https://miyagilabs.ai), an AI-powered education platform that transforms educational YouTube videos into interactive courses. It helps you learn better through active practice and personalized feedback.
We use LLMs to automatically generate quizzes, practice questions, and real-time feedback from any educational video or resource—turning passive watching into active learning. Here’s a short demo: https://youtu.be/alO7FaorHOY.
Improving education has always been tricky. Bloom’s 2-sigma problem (showing that a high-quality personal tutor is far more effective than conventional methods) has persisted, even as technology has advanced.
We met at MIT as CS majors and have always been passionate about education. Over the years, we’ve become teachers and experts in subjects like chess, algorithms, math, languages, and ninja warrior. A common theme was that we both heavily relied on YouTube to learn.
YouTube has incredible content for learning pretty much anything, but it’s buried in a lot of distractions. Also, passively watching videos is far less effective than taking notes, asking questions, and doing practice problems, which is what we aim to do with Miyagi Labs.
Our solution is essentially a multi-step function that takes in a YouTube playlist (or list of any resources) and outputs an entire course with summaries, questions, answers, and more. The pipeline is roughly: video/resource —> transcript/text —> chunks —> summary and question —> answers to questions, with some other features along the way.
We mostly use prompting and different models at each step to make the course as useful as possible. Certain topics require more practice problems vs. comprehension, and we’d use reasoning models for highly technical subjects.
We launched about three months ago and currently have 400+ courses and partnerships with some businesses and awesome creators. Some of our popular courses include 3Blue1Brown’s linear algebra course, a botany course on plants and ecology, and YC’s How to Start a Startup series.
Our product resembles classical MOOC-style course platforms in terms of UI, but is more interactive. It’s really easy to ask a question or receive custom feedback compared to a static course on Coursera. It’s also comparable to AI tutor sites, but we try to build more of a community and require less activation energy as a learner. We’re basically betting that AI can hugely improve education, but that students still want to learn from their favorite creators and want baseline shared resources for standard topics that are then augmented with personalized features.
You can try it here: https://miyagilabs.ai (no login required for most courses—but if you sign up you can also create your own course).
We’d love your feedback on what kinds of videos/resources you’d like to learn from, what’s missing from current learning tools, and if you know any creators or educators who would like to collaborate. Happy to hear any feedback and answer any questions!
Comments
You're compensating the youtube video creators for this, how? Are you asking their permission? Or is this similar to how all the AI scammers operate and just extracting value from other peoples work without compensation? Just curious if this will help the people who are actually doing the source work or if it's just another way to take other people's labor and make money off it without anything in return for them.
And no, I don't consider "they get extra views" a valid answer. Especially if you expect to make the windfall you want to make off their labor.
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.
Hmmm, I can't seem to log back in, using a non-google email.
Recently I've gotten a lot of benefit from much of Alex Hormozi's thoughts. Yesterday I grabbed a 4-hour video, ran it through a free transcript generator, dropped it in Claude, and asked for an outline.
Unsurprisingly, Claude struggled to provide a complete outline. Like, it did a lot! but kept leaving parts out. I was able to prompt Claude to fill in more, good enough for me.
Anyway I dropped it into Miyagi Labs, waited 30 minutes while it said the course was creating. I kept it open in a tab and kept an eye on it. Eventually I tried to open a new tab into Miyagi (maybe I'd see it under My Courses?) but I was no longer logged in, and can't log in.
Also only the top right login button gives the option to use non-gmail.
Sorry if I broke something! I love the idea!
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.
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?
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.
Not a bad concept. I already do something similar
I already use LLMs to quiz me on books that I'm reading. The current book I've been studying is "Computer Networking: A Top-Down Approach (8th edition)." Obviously since it is a text book, there are homework problems and other discussion points. However; it's also fun to ask grok/chatGPT to quiz me on previous chapters and correct my answers.
There's plenty of conference talks posted on YouTube that I've watched over the years. Next talk I watch I will probably test out being quizzed by LLMs.
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 :)
congrats on the launch!
i opened a random lecture (MIT 14.01 Lecture 19: International Trade: Welfare and Policy)
a- i tried an exercise without watching the video, and then clicked on 'watch' next to the question, i expected it would take me to relevant portion of the video instead it played it from beginning.
b- i used the ai tutor and asked 2 random questions, instead of giving me an answer it prodded to provide more detail. this might be an intentional choice to ensure learning, however i personally prefer chatgpt's style where it gives me some information and then provides more angles to pursue.
i also asked the tutor about batman, here's the response for reference:
tell me about batman That's a good start, but your question is very broad. When you say "tell me about Batman," are you looking for information about the character's origin, his role in comics, his significance in popular culture, or something else? Try to narrow down your question a bit.
For example, are you interested in: - Batman's backstory and how he became a superhero? - The different versions of Batman in comics, movies, and TV?
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!
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.
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 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.
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!!
The flashcards app is not great. It can improve.
More serious comment.
It seems like there is less space (in our mind, and time) for yet another app. If you have this, vs youtube for course, people will still flock to youtube. Why don't you add the value that you are giving here by directly integrating or enhancing youtube. A chrome plugin or a youtube browser?
I really like the motivation behind this product. Learning is hard.
Congrats on the launch! I personally am not sure I see the value in paying for a course, when (I assume) I can do this on my own by feeding a video link or file to an LLM and asking it to generate a course. I'm sure your courses are probably better, though, and there are probably a lot of people who don't want to go through those extra steps. Good luck!
Seems to actually work! Thanks for sharing, I'll be checking it out.
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?
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.
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?
This is so useful as so many of the best things to learn in the world aren't locked up in universities!
Neat idea! Do you do anything with the video itself? Understand the visual content or extract details from slides?
Do you have any revenue sharing program with the content creators? Or are you just poaching them?
Are the people that create the content okay with this?
I hope you view a YouTube ad on that video every time the course is opened otherwise it’s a self defeating system.
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 censored is the "AI Tutor"? can a parent leave their child with it unsupervised?
Miyagi is a pretty nice name to give!
Does the list of resources simply need to be a list of links to video objects?
Great idea! Automated quiz generation seems like a nice use case for LLMs.
this is super interesting would love to give it a try!
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
Nice work! Really cool.
No python course?
Congrats on launch
Great concept!
Good Stuff!
Nice App. Another similar one is You learn ai.
This is awesome! Congrats Tyrone & Guang!
[dead]
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.