4 ms·

LLM-Integrated Multivariable Calculus Course

42 points by sinaatalay 3mo ago

sinaatalay 3mo ago
The LLM has the video's full context, including visuals. Try chatting with it. Jump to any point in the video and ask questions about what you see.
- tptacek 3mo ago
  Problem sets?
  - sinaatalay 3mo ago
    In terms of UI, it's just videos and an LLM chat. Though, the videos include problems along with their solutions.
Jayakumark 3mo ago
Good, is there calc 1 and calc 2 or should we ask llm ?
- sinaatalay 3mo ago
  Calc 1 and Calc 2 will come later. We'll actually be doing this for hundreds of technical subjects over the next 6–12 months.
  - pell 3mo ago
    How are you guaranteeing accuracy?
    - sinaatalay 3mo ago
      By storing the content in a semantically meaningful way (not mp4s), making it easy to review, version control, and maintain.
      - sn9 3mo ago
        This isn't really an answer. How are you checking the accuracy of the content? Especially if you plan to scale this to hundreds of courses, it doesn't seem like you actually have humans checking.
        sinaatalay 3mo ago
        Let me elaborate. Our content is text, not MP4 files. So we review it with humans and AI, just like how software companies review their software. We may make mistakes, but that's okay because we maintain the content. We continuously improve it and fix issues as we find them. It'll even become more accurate than cam-recorded lecture videos over time, because those aren't being updated.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
supernebula 3mo ago
What tool was used for video generation?
- sinaatalay 3mo ago
  We have an in-house computer graphics pipeline. We reimplemented 3Blue1Brown's Manim in Rust from scratch. It is available at https://studio.academa.ai https://studio.academa.ai. The renderer runs in the browser using WebGPU.
  - KeplerBoy 3mo ago
    is that renderer open source?
    - sinaatalay 3mo ago
      No, not yet. It's something we may do in the future.
      - blagie 3mo ago
        LLM-written clones of free software into proprietary seem to be a growing trend now. With manim, it's probably legal (I think MIT license?), but in general, it makes the world a worse place.
        sinaatalay 3mo ago
        All we want to do is innovate. We simply can't open source this because we're rewriting and rebuilding it every day.
        blagie 3mo ago
        > All we want to do is innovate. That's very clear. That's why we have spyware, ad tech, WWII-era German chemical weapons, the East India Company, Oracle's business model, fintech, ... Ask anyone 40 years older. Regrets focus on time with family and meaningful work. Few people think: "Did I innovate enough?" > We simply can't open source this because we're rewriting and rebuilding it every day. I don't quite see the logical connection in this sentence. Everything I've worked on in the past 15 years is open-source. I suspect you'd: - Be able to find modest amounts of funding to do this in the open space (e.g. within the academy, as a teaching professor, adjunct, or similar) -- enough to sustain yourself, but without a promise of riches - Be able to "innovate," make more E($), and do less harm in corporate America
whattheheckheck 3mo ago
Who is signing off on the correctness?
- sinaatalay 3mo ago
  We are. We're confident in the quality of the teaching and the accuracy of the content in these videos. Our videos are not some MP4 files sitting on a disk. We see our content like software. We review it, version-control it, and maintain it.
  - anonymouz 3mo ago
    Who is "we"?
    - sinaatalay 3mo ago
      We're an edtech startup, Academa: https://academa.ai https://academa.ai We're two PhD students and close friends since our undergraduate years. I'm Sina: https://sinaatalay.com https://sinaatalay.com And my co-founder, Apo: https://geduk.io https://geduk.io
mw888 3mo ago
I think a lot of this is the inevitable (and good) direction teaching must go. As someone who has self-taught most of my skills both before and after AI, some deep feedback: I don't want a fixed piece of content when learning with AI, like a video or blogpost or book—unless I'm completely new to the subject, and even then maybe not. The reason is that some parts of the topic will be naturally easier or harder for me. When I use AI I tell it everything I know and understand and start working from my most burning questions and misunderstandings. This lets me cover the maximum amount of non-redundant ground in regards to my understanding. We have this amazing new technology and you're conforming it to models of schooling (like the Prussian model) which are one or more centuries old. The technology is so powerful that it should allow you to completely reshape education, not merely replicate the status quo.
- sinaatalay 3mo ago
  I couldn't agree more. But if you look at it from this perspective, you may understand why we use static videos for this demo. Definition: the AI tutor is some AI that can generate these videos. If that generation happens in real time, it's a complete reimagination of education. It's literally the AI private tutor. But before you can do that in real time, ask yourself: let alone real time, can you even generate a video, let's say, in 30 minutes? That's what we explored, and we found some great things. But it's not real time yet. The only practical way to publish what we'd built, though, was as a static video paired with chat. The complete reimagination of education is on the way.
  - mw888 3mo ago
    That's great. You certainly know more the ins-and-outs, and I wish you luck.
- IamTC 3mo ago
  The impact of LLMs on learning is also something I am keen on, both for myself and for my children and how I should guide them along. The tech is undeniably useful but useless/harmless if employed without care for first principles of learning. Most literature seem to indicate that whatever the manner of use, "friction" while learning ultimately still helps. My first "experimental" touchpoint is using LLMs as a called "socratic tutor". Edit: because fat fingered submit while typing this on a split keyboard
blagie 3mo ago
This sort of thing makes me depressed. The videos are LLM slop. You're a confused student. You do a web search. You run into something like this. It looks high-quality and professional. It is dogshit which no one can understand. The result is a confused learner who feels bad about themselves. At the same time, thousands of low-quality resources overwhelm good content. Integrating with an existing resources like MOOCulus could add a ton of value, in contrast, but wouldn't have the promise of making the creators money. Being able to create manim animations at scale is a value-add, but doesn't seem enough of a value-add to create a business which does anything other than active harm. But it seems to be trying to be one.
- pishpash 3mo ago
  Most textbooks are bad too. It's worth looking at some sample content to find the good ones.
- sinaatalay 3mo ago
  There are some incorrect premises here. "The videos are LLM slop." - No, they're not. Watch them. "It's dogshit that no one can understand." - That's not true. Try it.
  - aureianimus 3mo ago
    I watched some snippets, and would like to put forward some points in support of the former: - The voice is clearly TTS, which I think really loses something. Not having variation or stressing particular parts with intonation is a big deal in teaching. The beginning of lecture 5 has a pause in a weird spot (surface). - The intro to the first lecture is already unnatural: "And that's of course now we're going to start working with functions of more than one variable." - The scaffolding in lecture 1 is off to a bad start. The lecture tries to rope the student in with a question, but the question uses the notion and notation of a vector that has not been introduced yet. This reeks of a prompt "use a (motivating) question to introduce the topic", but a question that cannot be understood by a student does not help.
    - 3mo ago
yoyohello13 3mo ago
Content is interesting and seems accurate to me. That narrator drives me nuts though. There too many “like” “you know” “so” “down here”. Comes off grating, I don’t think I could listen to multiple hours of this.
- sinaatalay 3mo ago
  Thank you for the feedback!
gulugawa 3mo ago
I asked the bot questions about competitive Pokemon and Game of Thrones which it answered.
- polymer8563 3mo ago
  what even is competitive game of thrones?competing for who withstands more the finale?

42 points by sinaatalay 3mo ago

The LLM has the video's full context, including visuals. Try chatting with it. Jump to any point in the video and ask questions about what you see.

tptacek 3mo ago
Problem sets?
- sinaatalay 3mo ago
  In terms of UI, it's just videos and an LLM chat. Though, the videos include problems along with their solutions.

Jayakumark 3mo ago

Good, is there calc 1 and calc 2 or should we ask llm ?

sinaatalay 3mo ago
Calc 1 and Calc 2 will come later. We'll actually be doing this for hundreds of technical subjects over the next 6–12 months.
- pell 3mo ago
  How are you guaranteeing accuracy?
  - sinaatalay 3mo ago
    By storing the content in a semantically meaningful way (not mp4s), making it easy to review, version control, and maintain.
    - sn9 3mo ago
      This isn't really an answer. How are you checking the accuracy of the content? Especially if you plan to scale this to hundreds of courses, it doesn't seem like you actually have humans checking.
      - sinaatalay 3mo ago
        Let me elaborate. Our content is text, not MP4 files. So we review it with humans and AI, just like how software companies review their software. We may make mistakes, but that's okay because we maintain the content. We continuously improve it and fix issues as we find them. It'll even become more accurate than cam-recorded lecture videos over time, because those aren't being updated.

deleted 3mo ago

[deleted]

supernebula 3mo ago

What tool was used for video generation?

sinaatalay 3mo ago
We have an in-house computer graphics pipeline. We reimplemented 3Blue1Brown's Manim in Rust from scratch. It is available at https://studio.academa.ai https://studio.academa.ai. The renderer runs in the browser using WebGPU.
- KeplerBoy 3mo ago
  is that renderer open source?
  - sinaatalay 3mo ago
    No, not yet. It's something we may do in the future.
    - blagie 3mo ago
      LLM-written clones of free software into proprietary seem to be a growing trend now. With manim, it's probably legal (I think MIT license?), but in general, it makes the world a worse place.
      - sinaatalay 3mo ago
        All we want to do is innovate. We simply can't open source this because we're rewriting and rebuilding it every day.
        blagie 3mo ago
        > All we want to do is innovate. That's very clear. That's why we have spyware, ad tech, WWII-era German chemical weapons, the East India Company, Oracle's business model, fintech, ... Ask anyone 40 years older. Regrets focus on time with family and meaningful work. Few people think: "Did I innovate enough?" > We simply can't open source this because we're rewriting and rebuilding it every day. I don't quite see the logical connection in this sentence. Everything I've worked on in the past 15 years is open-source. I suspect you'd: - Be able to find modest amounts of funding to do this in the open space (e.g. within the academy, as a teaching professor, adjunct, or similar) -- enough to sustain yourself, but without a promise of riches - Be able to "innovate," make more E($), and do less harm in corporate America

whattheheckheck 3mo ago

Who is signing off on the correctness?

sinaatalay 3mo ago
We are. We're confident in the quality of the teaching and the accuracy of the content in these videos. Our videos are not some MP4 files sitting on a disk. We see our content like software. We review it, version-control it, and maintain it.
- anonymouz 3mo ago
  Who is "we"?
  - sinaatalay 3mo ago
    We're an edtech startup, Academa: https://academa.ai https://academa.ai We're two PhD students and close friends since our undergraduate years. I'm Sina: https://sinaatalay.com https://sinaatalay.com And my co-founder, Apo: https://geduk.io https://geduk.io

mw888 3mo ago

I think a lot of this is the inevitable (and good) direction teaching must go. As someone who has self-taught most of my skills both before and after AI, some deep feedback: I don't want a fixed piece of content when learning with AI, like a video or blogpost or book—unless I'm completely new to the subject, and even then maybe not. The reason is that some parts of the topic will be naturally easier or harder for me. When I use AI I tell it everything I know and understand and start working from my most burning questions and misunderstandings. This lets me cover the maximum amount of non-redundant ground in regards to my understanding. We have this amazing new technology and you're conforming it to models of schooling (like the Prussian model) which are one or more centuries old. The technology is so powerful that it should allow you to completely reshape education, not merely replicate the status quo.

sinaatalay 3mo ago
I couldn't agree more. But if you look at it from this perspective, you may understand why we use static videos for this demo. Definition: the AI tutor is some AI that can generate these videos. If that generation happens in real time, it's a complete reimagination of education. It's literally the AI private tutor. But before you can do that in real time, ask yourself: let alone real time, can you even generate a video, let's say, in 30 minutes? That's what we explored, and we found some great things. But it's not real time yet. The only practical way to publish what we'd built, though, was as a static video paired with chat. The complete reimagination of education is on the way.
- mw888 3mo ago
  That's great. You certainly know more the ins-and-outs, and I wish you luck.
IamTC 3mo ago
The impact of LLMs on learning is also something I am keen on, both for myself and for my children and how I should guide them along. The tech is undeniably useful but useless/harmless if employed without care for first principles of learning. Most literature seem to indicate that whatever the manner of use, "friction" while learning ultimately still helps. My first "experimental" touchpoint is using LLMs as a called "socratic tutor". Edit: because fat fingered submit while typing this on a split keyboard

blagie 3mo ago

This sort of thing makes me depressed. The videos are LLM slop. You're a confused student. You do a web search. You run into something like this. It looks high-quality and professional. It is dogshit which no one can understand. The result is a confused learner who feels bad about themselves. At the same time, thousands of low-quality resources overwhelm good content. Integrating with an existing resources like MOOCulus could add a ton of value, in contrast, but wouldn't have the promise of making the creators money. Being able to create manim animations at scale is a value-add, but doesn't seem enough of a value-add to create a business which does anything other than active harm. But it seems to be trying to be one.

pishpash 3mo ago
Most textbooks are bad too. It's worth looking at some sample content to find the good ones.
sinaatalay 3mo ago
There are some incorrect premises here. "The videos are LLM slop." - No, they're not. Watch them. "It's dogshit that no one can understand." - That's not true. Try it.
- aureianimus 3mo ago
  I watched some snippets, and would like to put forward some points in support of the former: - The voice is clearly TTS, which I think really loses something. Not having variation or stressing particular parts with intonation is a big deal in teaching. The beginning of lecture 5 has a pause in a weird spot (surface). - The intro to the first lecture is already unnatural: "And that's of course now we're going to start working with functions of more than one variable." - The scaffolding in lecture 1 is off to a bad start. The lecture tries to rope the student in with a question, but the question uses the notion and notation of a vector that has not been introduced yet. This reeks of a prompt "use a (motivating) question to introduce the topic", but a question that cannot be understood by a student does not help.
  - 3mo ago

yoyohello13 3mo ago

Content is interesting and seems accurate to me. That narrator drives me nuts though. There too many “like” “you know” “so” “down here”. Comes off grating, I don’t think I could listen to multiple hours of this.

sinaatalay 3mo ago
Thank you for the feedback!

gulugawa 3mo ago

I asked the bot questions about competitive Pokemon and Game of Thrones which it answered.

polymer8563 3mo ago
what even is competitive game of thrones?competing for who withstands more the finale?