23 ms·
Launch 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 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 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 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!
- lassenordahl 1y agoJust 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 1y agoNice work! Really cool.
- karar01 1y agoGood Stuff!
- bananapub 1y agoHow do you validate you’re not generating garbage, and thus teaching people nonsense?
- bestwillcui 1y agoFor 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 1y agoIs 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)