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Launch HN: Miyagi (YC W25) turns YouTube videos into online, interactive courses

46•bestwillcui•2h ago
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

lassenordahl•1h ago
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.
rylan-talerico•1h ago
Nice work! Really cool.
karar01•1h ago
Good Stuff!
bananapub•1h ago
How do you validate you’re not generating garbage, and thus teaching people nonsense?
bestwillcui•1h ago
For official courses, we go over the generated course with the creator to vet the content. Generally they're pretty impressed but have a few things they'd like to change/add before publishing.

For self-created courses, it's generally been quite accurate and we're playing around with some eval metrics to make it as good as possible, but it's definitely a concern.

kamranjon•45m ago
Is the course creator being impressed the most important metric? Are there other more concrete metrics you are able to use to determine quality from the perspective of a student?

I am curious if you are using any methodologies from the digital learning space like knowledge tracing to help ensure that learners are actually retaining knowledge and improving over time or knowledge mapping to understand the gaps that might exist in your content?

Do you maintain your own skills taxonomy? Are you tagging your questions or assessment events with knowledge components or skills of any kind to understand what you are testing your students for?

All of this is really cool, I’m just curious at what level you’ve gotten to on some of this because there is a very fine line in online educational content between making the students life more difficult and actually helping them learn, especially when you get into auto-generating content, and especially if you aren’t following solid principles to verify your content. (I work for an online education company and particularly in the space of training LLMs and verifying their outputs for use in educational contexts)

notachatbot123•44m ago
So in less promotional words:

- For official courses the creators are doing some quality control and do necessary fixes. - For self-created courses there is zero human supervision or quality control.

Is that correct?

vm•1h ago
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)?

basch•1h ago
Would be nice ie to see this product with focus on elementary school age content.
WildRyc•1h ago
The article states that Anaina and Burke separately conducted their tests, but social robots [1] have been shown to be effective in individual tutoring. Human tutoring is not always better than a well-designed computer program [2]. There have been issues with how studies interpret their effect on group size / scalability [3].

[1] https://www.science.org/doi/full/10.1126/scirobotics.aat5954 [2] https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00461520.2011.61... [3] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.3102/0013189X2091279...

pxndxx•1h ago
Are the people that create the content okay with this?
zoklet-enjoyer•1h ago
Who cares?
Applejinx•1h ago
Marketers, among others
haswell•48m ago
The people who spend hundreds of hours carefully creating content for their viewers care [0].

The referenced video is from a photographer who has some pretty strong and reasonable thoughts on this - specifically the features YouTube itself is experimenting with.

Depending on the nature of the AI product, it has the potential to completely sideline creators.

Not saying that’s what Miyagi is doing and it sounds like they’re actually working with creators on this which is good. But the broader point is that such tools need to be thoughtfully implemented.

- [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUSS1-G3do

tdthree•1h ago
Yes. Any content that we monetize we are revenue sharing with the creator. We already have more than 5 partnerships with creators.
chairhairair•45m ago
3b1b is a monetized partner?

Association with that brand would be very valuable.

tdthree•40m ago
Not yet! We don't monetize his content (it's not behind a paywall). But we are talking with him :)
haswell•27m ago
Do creators have the option to opt out?

I’m still coming up to speed on the full scope of what your product does, but I’m curious what you’d say to someone like pal2tec, who has some fairly strong and what I feel to be reasonable views about the impact of content summarization [0].

Getting direct buy-in and sharing revenue is great. But it’s not clear to me that this is the only thing that creators care about, i.e. are you still summarizing content you’re not monetizing without creator buy-in?

- [0] https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ULUSS1-G3do

solardev•21m ago
Not to be ironic, but... is there a summary of that video? It's a bit long and he doesn't seem to get to the point for quite a while.
haswell•13m ago
It’s an 8 minute video…and even shorter at 1.5X that will take me longer to summarize than you to watch.

But in summary, YouTube is rolling out AI summarization features on some content without giving creators any say in the matter.

Concerns include:

- Low quality summarization of high quality content will devalue the content, and in many cases is just a worse version of the content

- Impact to watch time on the channel can impact channel success over time

- YouTube is not doing anything to compensate creators for reducing watch time such as sharing revenue from viewers who primarily interact with the AI summary

But I think he articulates this much better than I did. Much better to watch the video.

fzysingularity•1h ago
Neat idea! Do you do anything with the video itself? Understand the visual content or extract details from slides?
tdthree•1h ago
Users can upload slides (ie. docx or pptx) and create a course from them - give it a try! For videos, we don't currently process any frames from the video just the transcript, but this is on the roadmap.
sperr11•53m ago
Great concept!
ix101•48m ago
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?
CharlieDigital•33m ago
I was actually thinking about building this because I watch a lot of YT videos in other languages (best way to do travel research is to search the destination using the local name and getting local videos).
bestwillcui•28m ago
Thanks! Definitely some potential, we actually built a language learning tool for a few days early on (but decided that it was too crowded of a space to start in).

Learning languages seems a bit different in that there's more focus on repetition compared to comprehension questions, but there are certain topics (like grammar concepts) that could work well in our current structure. Also there are some really popular YouTube channels for learning any language, so we definitely see a potential to augment those videos to more accurately & effectively learn.

joshdavham•40m ago
How worried are you about platform risk?
notpushkin•25m ago
I don’t think they’re attached to YouTube too rigidly. (Well, I hope at least.) In theory this should work with any platform that provides subtitles. But I think if YouTube falls, or blocks their API access, they would just start hosting the videos themselves.
tdthree•1m ago
Yea YouTube is only one format we support. Users can also upload pdfs, mp4, docx, pptx, etc. And we already do support video hosting ourselves. It wouldn't be great if YouTube decided to part ways with us, but we'd be just fine.
breakpointalpha•33m ago
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

https://www.youtube.com/@CarrotCornerPoker

https://www.youtube.com/@PokerCoaching

bestwillcui•25m ago
Thanks, we'll reach out. We have a poker course from MIT (https://miyagilabs.ai/course/mit15s50) but yea these seem more practical & engaging.
tdthree•20m ago
Poker is interesting. I think these videos do work in our current course generation process. However, I do think some subjects like poker need custom tooling around the course to really make the learning experience great. For example, access to solvers or actually playing a hand on a table is a part of the course experience as well. Chess is another one that falls in this special bucket imo. Some of this tooling is on the roadmap!
eochaid•25m ago
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.

jmathai•16m ago
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.

toomuchtodo•11m ago
Does the list of resources simply need to be a list of links to video objects?
clamlady•6m 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.
aeblyve•4m ago
Great idea! Automated quiz generation seems like a nice use case for LLMs.

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