Why do I need to use this? Why can't I just use the LLMs directly to generate lectures if I want?
Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
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Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#12Why do I need to use this? Why can't I just use the LLMs directly to generate lectures if I want?
You can attempt to do it, but you'll see that it won't work. We've built the underlying "lectures as code" technology to make this work.
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#13To 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?
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#14Why do I need to use this? Why can't I just use the LLMs directly to generate lectures if I want?
You can attempt to do it, but you'll see that it won't work. We've built the underlying "lectures as code" technology to make this work.
You just said in another comment that you use Claude Opus 5 to generate the video in a single shot. What about it won't work?
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#15This 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?
Thank you!
Actually, the economics are quite good.
We’re not using video generation models. We ask an LLM to write the lecture as code, then render it deterministically with computer graphics and TTS.
So the main costs are the LLM call, TTS, and some cloud GPU time for rendering. That ends up being much cheaper than generating long form video directly with video models.
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can attempt to do it, but you'll see that it won't work. We've built the underlying "lectures as code" technology to make this work.
You just said in another comment that you use Claude Opus 5 to generate the video in a single shot. What about it won't work?
We ask Claude Opus 5 to write a specific kind of source code that only our proprietary software understands and can render into a lecture video with computer graphics and TTS.
Without our system, there isn’t really an equivalent target language you can ask the LLM to write. Manim exists, but you won’t get videos like these by simply asking an LLM to generate Manim code.
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#17To 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…
We think videos are special. There is a reason why Khan Academy, Coursera, etc. are essentially video libraries. A lecture video is a recording of a teaching performance, a form of presentation where someone explains while controlling what you see and when you see it.
Also, you’re not chatting with the transcript; you’re chatting with the video. The AI has much more than the transcript in its context. See this, for example: https://academa.ai/lectures/diffusion-models-learning-to-den...
And in the coming months, we’ll make the answers themselves real-time videos, which is kind of trivial for us at this point. We’ll ask the LLM to answer by writing code, and our software will render that code and show you the response directly as a video.
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#18Fellow PhD student here, always wished for easier ways to update lecture content. This "code to video" idea could be huge for reproducibility.
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#19[flagged]
Re: Show HN: Academa – Long-form STEM lecture videos generated by LLMs
#20To 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…
> 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.
I've rarely, if ever, seen this. And if I had, I think most of the class would have just been annoyed, which you probably didn't notice.