Show HN: AI that generates 3blue1brown-style explainer videos

I've been building prototypes of new AI learning tools for months, but I recently learned that 3blue1brown open sourced his incredible math animation library, Manim, and that LLMs could generate code for it without any fine-tuning.

So I made a tool that automatically generates animated math/science explanations in the style of 3blue1brown using Manim from any text prompt.

Try it yourself at https://TMA.live (no signup required)

or see the demo video here: https://x.com/i/status/1874948287759081608

The UX is pretty simple right now, you just write a text prompt and then start watching the video as it's generated. Once it's done generating you can download it.

I built this because I kept finding myself spending 30+ minutes in AI chats trying to understand very specific concepts that would have clicked instantly if there were a visual explanations on YouTube.

Technical Implementation:

- LLM + prompt to use Manim well, right now this uses Gemini with grounding to ensure some level of factuality, but it works equally well with Claude

- Manim for animation generation

- OpenAI TTS for the voiceovers

- Fly.io for hosting the web app

- Modal.com for fast serverless GPUs to render the videos

- HLS protocol for streaming the videos as they are rendered

Note: This is focused on STEM education and visualization, and it is particularly good for math, but get creative and try it with anything! I used it recently to teach my partner's parents a new board game in Mandarin (which I don't speak!)

I'll be around to answer questions. Happy learning!

Show HN: AI that generates 3blue1brown-style explainer videos
tma.live

thanks! Streaming was actually pretty hard to get working, but it goes roughly like this as a streaming pipeline:

- The LLM is prompted to generate an explainer video as sequence of small Manim scene segments with corresponding voiceovers

- LLM streams response token-by-token as Server-Sent-Events

- Whenever a complete Manim segment is finished, send it to Modal to start rendering

- Start streaming the rendered partial video files from manim as they are generated via HLS

Whether I click an existing example or type in my own it doesn't seem to work. A dialog pops up for a second saying 'generating video' and then disappears.

Well, I'm blown away. "Show me how information propagates through a neural net."

I feel like this is the one thing that's been missing from all the LLMs: actual visual explainers, whether image or video. python plots only get you so far, and all the Diffusion stuff is nonsensical. This is amazing.

These are amazing examples! Thanks for all the feedback, detailed info, and persistence in trying! HN hug of death means I'm running into Gemini rate limits unfortunately :( will def make that more clear when it happens in the UI and try to find some workarounds.

The other issues are bugs with my streaming logic retrying clips which failed to generate. LLMs aren't yet perfect at writing Manim, so to keep things smooth I try to skip clips which fail to render properly. Still also have layout issues which are hard to automatically detect.

I expect with a few more generations of LLM updates, prompt iterating, and better streaming/retrying logic on my end this will become more reliable