Show HN: AI that generates 3blue1brown-style explainer videos (opens in new tab)

(tma.live)

93 pointszan24341y ago46 comments

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!

46 comments

deng1y ago

As usual with these things: it is impressive that stuff like this can be generated so quickly at all, but the content is very superficial and often wrong or at least misleading. It's unusable for learning, but great for spamming platforms, just like NotebookLM for instance.

As an example, I asked about the Cantor function. It generated a 1:24 video, which is laughably short, explained correctly how the Cantor set is defined but showed a flawed visual representation, then simply skipped over how the Cantor function is constructed and simply states the basic properties. Sorry, but this is garbage content.

mistaken1y ago

It will happily explain non existing concepts as well: https://tma.live/video/26c9fec7-3bb7-42e5-837f-617fd5659f70

wryoak1y ago

It didn’t explain soul capsules at all though, it barely mentioned them

potsandpans1y ago

Incredible

mrayycombi1y ago

Those videos are apex quality videos. You might as well ask for Nobel prize literature quality essays from ChatGPT.

You can probably imitate the structure/scaffolding of a 3b1b video in a cargo cult way, but you are losing domain expert level verification of quality (which is why AI fails, because it's not a domain expert).

So heres how I'm hearing yoir question, and it answers itself: "how do I get domain expert quality from a non-domain expert AI?"....

ithkuil1y ago

I once heard an interesting definition of what an expert is:

"An expert is a person who is far away from home and gives advice"

QuantumGood1y ago

More modern version: "A person from out of town with a briefcase".

guerrilla1y ago

What.

1 more reply

Eddy_Viscosity21y ago

Great but wrong answers. I asked how big tree-3 was after some helpful explaining about exponentials, it tells me its 27. This is... an underestimate.

krackers1y ago

I'm not really a bear on llms, but using it for explanations in this way needs a lot of caution. It's very easy to give an argument that "seems" right at first glance, e.g. https://xkcd.com/803/

zan2434OP1y ago

totally fair! I like the XKCD comic as well because it hints at a potential solution - even if you can't always be correct, how you respond to critical questions can really help. I'm working on a feature for users to ask follow up questions and definitely going to consider how to make it most honest and curious

philipwhiuk1y ago

Whose voice are you 'borrowing' for this?

Compared to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24GfgNtnjXc this video is absurdly limited https://tma.live/video/9c8e725e-ec21-41a7-984a-317d84216497

progbits1y ago

Mildly off topic, for what I think is the best material on rainbows check out this lecture (and the entire 801+802 courses by Walter Lewin)

https://youtu.be/pj0wXRLXai8

execat1y ago

In his last lecture he mentions that the best part of teaching is when a student sends them a photo of a rainbow 10 years after graduating, saying that they remember the whole physics behind it.

Same for me. I think of the cones of light being formed when I see the rainbow and that amazing lecture.

zan2434OP1y ago

The voice is just OpenAI’s default tts voice. I agree that Veritasium video is an incredible work and the ai version is absurd by comparison! This is mostly a proof of concept that this is possible at all, and as LLMs get smarter it’ll be interesting to see if the quality automatically improves. For now, the tool is really only useful for very specific or personal questions that wouldn’t already exist on YouTube.

tunesmith1y ago

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.

beshrkayali1y ago

I have to give you props for not requiring me to sign up, I’ve seen many ShowHN posts lately that require me to unnecessarily create an account which always prompts me to close the tab immediately.

AndrewKemendo1y ago

I tried a few times and this is my experience

1. Doesn't work at all on Firefox 133.0.3 (64-bit)

2. Works on Chrome 131.0.6778.205 (Official Build) (64-bit)

3. No existing links do anything but a sub second "Generating" which disappears quickly

4. Does not work in Incognito on Chrome 131.0.6778.205 (Official Build) (64-bit)

My prompt kind of worked but ended at 48 seconds

Prompt: "Describe a honeybee learning which flower to land on in a field using Markov Decision Process with Bellman updating":

https://tma.live/video/88f535b5-0e5f-41ca-9bd8-e35e7aa8a95a

I ran it a second time and got a longer video of 1:55 but it primarily just created Text. It also didn't explain Bellman's equation and wrote it incorrectly:

https://tma.live/video/88f535b5-0e5f-41ca-9bd8-e35e7aa8a95a

The second prompt kind of worked but ends at 47 seconds and then loops the final 4 seconds forever.

Prompt: "Describe how the OODA Loop, MDP and SPA learning approaches are the same"

https://tma.live/video/ee7b5048-3fde-4f1a-8ec1-c8bb48883c75

Overall this worked as described. It's more than fast enough, but fails to deliver on consistency and graphics.

A few more iterations and fine tuning and you'll have a solid Beta. I can see this being very useful after another year or so of use and tuning.

Great work and congrats on shipping.

zan2434OP1y ago

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

OutOfHere1y ago

You didn't think to add a queue (with trackable status links)?

1 more reply

Tiberium1y ago

MathGPT also has this (exactly in the same 3blue1brown style, so I guess they also use manim), and in my experience it does actually work better and tries to explain math and write the equations.

I think they use some extremely cheap model for writing the code, probably 4o-mini or similar.

neumann1y ago

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.

zan2434OP1y ago

sad looks like I already hit the Gemini rate limit :( Switching to Claude!

zkmon1y ago

Most hilarious is https://tma.live/video/8eb2d318-3217-4c09-a8aa-3fc7e8bb7cca

I asked a history question - tell me about Reddy kings rule. It made up a physics rule and started talking about electrons.

cchance1y ago

The Manim is not great, words overlapping etc, the page itself needs a lot of work, generating and then nothing happens, and it seems in a lot of case your backend workflows have issues, with descriptions only starting and ending after a say 30s when it needs to go another 1-2 minutes at least

drewolbrich1y ago

Thank you for sharing. This is a wonderful experiment and I think this concept has a lot of potential.

csomar1y ago

Pure Garbage: https://tma.live/video/5fe506ca-3831-4ba3-b9c6-ff899c571bf1

Although it is pretty impressive for what an LLM can generate these days.

IshKebab1y ago

Well, it wasn't wrong at least, it just... stopped about 1% into the explanation.

cr4zy1y ago

Wow, this is awesome! Thanks for building. I didn't realize there was a protocol for streaming while rendering, though I noticed sumo.ai doing something similar for audio. Gemini with grounding is new to me also, very nice!

zan2434OP1y ago

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

h_tbob1y ago

Haha that’s funny, the beehive one lays out the hexagons as if they were squares - so they overlap and have empty space lol! But still it’s a promising concept.

Btw for some reason on iOS I had to download to view the video

cstigler1y ago

This is so cool! Streaming videos while the Manim code is still generating is super impressive - sure that took a lot of hacking.

htk1y ago

Pretty incredible how fast those videos are being generated. Excellent work! You can now spam YT shorts all day.

StefanBatory1y ago

Can I ask from curiosity how long it took you to program and design this entire project?

zan2434OP1y ago

Hmm the initial version of the app only took me about a day to get something working, but that version took minutes to generate a single video and even then only worked a third of the time. It took a solid 2 weeks from there to add all the edge cases to the prompt to increase reliability, add GPU rendering and streaming to improve performance/latency, and shore up the infra for scaling.

StefanBatory1y ago

Thank you!

indigodaddy1y ago

Kudos to you this is really impressive

MidhaelBollox1y ago

Not working

zan2434OP1y ago

I was running into some scaling issues, but should be all working now!

Snoeprol1y ago

Awesome!

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

46 comments

deng1y ago

mistaken1y ago

It will happily explain non existing concepts as well: https://tma.live/video/26c9fec7-3bb7-42e5-837f-617fd5659f70

wryoak1y ago

It didn’t explain soul capsules at all though, it barely mentioned them

potsandpans1y ago

Incredible

mrayycombi1y ago

Those videos are apex quality videos. You might as well ask for Nobel prize literature quality essays from ChatGPT.

So heres how I'm hearing yoir question, and it answers itself: "how do I get domain expert quality from a non-domain expert AI?"....

ithkuil1y ago

I once heard an interesting definition of what an expert is:

"An expert is a person who is far away from home and gives advice"

QuantumGood1y ago

More modern version: "A person from out of town with a briefcase".

guerrilla1y ago

What.

1 more reply

Eddy_Viscosity21y ago

Great but wrong answers. I asked how big tree-3 was after some helpful explaining about exponentials, it tells me its 27. This is... an underestimate.

krackers1y ago

I'm not really a bear on llms, but using it for explanations in this way needs a lot of caution. It's very easy to give an argument that "seems" right at first glance, e.g. https://xkcd.com/803/

zan2434OP1y ago

philipwhiuk1y ago

Whose voice are you 'borrowing' for this?

Compared to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24GfgNtnjXc this video is absurdly limited https://tma.live/video/9c8e725e-ec21-41a7-984a-317d84216497

progbits1y ago

Mildly off topic, for what I think is the best material on rainbows check out this lecture (and the entire 801+802 courses by Walter Lewin)

https://youtu.be/pj0wXRLXai8

execat1y ago

In his last lecture he mentions that the best part of teaching is when a student sends them a photo of a rainbow 10 years after graduating, saying that they remember the whole physics behind it.

Same for me. I think of the cones of light being formed when I see the rainbow and that amazing lecture.

zan2434OP1y ago

tunesmith1y ago

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

beshrkayali1y ago

I have to give you props for not requiring me to sign up, I’ve seen many ShowHN posts lately that require me to unnecessarily create an account which always prompts me to close the tab immediately.

AndrewKemendo1y ago

I tried a few times and this is my experience

1. Doesn't work at all on Firefox 133.0.3 (64-bit)

2. Works on Chrome 131.0.6778.205 (Official Build) (64-bit)

3. No existing links do anything but a sub second "Generating" which disappears quickly

4. Does not work in Incognito on Chrome 131.0.6778.205 (Official Build) (64-bit)

My prompt kind of worked but ended at 48 seconds

Prompt: "Describe a honeybee learning which flower to land on in a field using Markov Decision Process with Bellman updating":

https://tma.live/video/88f535b5-0e5f-41ca-9bd8-e35e7aa8a95a

I ran it a second time and got a longer video of 1:55 but it primarily just created Text. It also didn't explain Bellman's equation and wrote it incorrectly:

https://tma.live/video/88f535b5-0e5f-41ca-9bd8-e35e7aa8a95a

The second prompt kind of worked but ends at 47 seconds and then loops the final 4 seconds forever.

Prompt: "Describe how the OODA Loop, MDP and SPA learning approaches are the same"

https://tma.live/video/ee7b5048-3fde-4f1a-8ec1-c8bb48883c75

Overall this worked as described. It's more than fast enough, but fails to deliver on consistency and graphics.

A few more iterations and fine tuning and you'll have a solid Beta. I can see this being very useful after another year or so of use and tuning.

Great work and congrats on shipping.

zan2434OP1y ago

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

OutOfHere1y ago

You didn't think to add a queue (with trackable status links)?

1 more reply

Tiberium1y ago

MathGPT also has this (exactly in the same 3blue1brown style, so I guess they also use manim), and in my experience it does actually work better and tries to explain math and write the equations.

I think they use some extremely cheap model for writing the code, probably 4o-mini or similar.

neumann1y ago

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.

zan2434OP1y ago

sad looks like I already hit the Gemini rate limit :( Switching to Claude!

zkmon1y ago

Most hilarious is https://tma.live/video/8eb2d318-3217-4c09-a8aa-3fc7e8bb7cca

I asked a history question - tell me about Reddy kings rule. It made up a physics rule and started talking about electrons.

cchance1y ago

drewolbrich1y ago

Thank you for sharing. This is a wonderful experiment and I think this concept has a lot of potential.

csomar1y ago

Pure Garbage: https://tma.live/video/5fe506ca-3831-4ba3-b9c6-ff899c571bf1

Although it is pretty impressive for what an LLM can generate these days.

IshKebab1y ago

Well, it wasn't wrong at least, it just... stopped about 1% into the explanation.

cr4zy1y ago

zan2434OP1y ago

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

h_tbob1y ago

Haha that’s funny, the beehive one lays out the hexagons as if they were squares - so they overlap and have empty space lol! But still it’s a promising concept.

Btw for some reason on iOS I had to download to view the video

cstigler1y ago

This is so cool! Streaming videos while the Manim code is still generating is super impressive - sure that took a lot of hacking.

htk1y ago

Pretty incredible how fast those videos are being generated. Excellent work! You can now spam YT shorts all day.

StefanBatory1y ago

Can I ask from curiosity how long it took you to program and design this entire project?

zan2434OP1y ago

StefanBatory1y ago

Thank you!

indigodaddy1y ago

Kudos to you this is really impressive