Show HN: MathGPT – Create math animations for any question

math-gpt.org

84 points by yannigk 14 days ago

Hi, we're MathGPT! MathGPT creates Khan-Academy-style animated math videos that intuitively explain complex concepts to students, helping them understand how to solve their problems step-by-step. We're currently serving over 2M users, processing 800M tokens / day and growing! If you try it out, we would appreciate feedback on how we can make the overall experience / video generation better! Email me at ygk2[at]cornell.edu.

zaptrem 14 days ago

We used it to make memes (single sentence prompts) and the results are hilarious

How Jeb! Won the election: https://math-gpt.org/?video_id=b9e16dbd-cab6-44e3-a393-f255b...

Mathematical proof AI is doomed: https://math-gpt.org/?video_id=c5745f99-b1d1-4c57-8a93-6fe3b...

  • jamilton 14 days ago

    Surprisingly funny! AI is often unfunny when it tries to be funny, I wonder why this is better.

    • zaptrem 14 days ago

      We wondered the same thing! I wonder which model they’re using.

  • pixelsort 14 days ago

    Ha! Okay, I laughed at "computational phrenology".

  • malshe 14 days ago

    Hilarious! This can potentially go viral

  • yannigk 13 days ago

    Haha these are amazing! I love them!

lagrange77 13 days ago

That's a really interesting application of LLMs and manim.

My problem with it, as with LLMs in general, is that i can't fully trust it. This isn't a problem with topics you know well. But those 3b1b style tutorials are meant to build an understanding or mental model of a concept for people who don't know it well yet. I'm afraid that, if the output is (partially) wrong, watching such a video could be even harmful in understanding the concept, because your 'greenfield' brain may pick up pieces of it that made sense to it.

jrussino 14 days ago

FYI for the input "Graph a cartoid and explain it" I get a correct definition and some interesting facts/properties (in spite of the fact that I mis-remembered the name of the object I had in mind; it should have been "cardioid"). But then it tries to provide a plot, and the plot has an error:

``` Error Please check your input: Undefined variable heta ```

Looks like there's a "theta" that's being incorrectly truncated, or something to that effect.

I refreshed a few times and found that I consistently saw this same error.

  • yannigk 13 days ago

    I was able to replicate your error and pushed a fix, it should be working pretty reliably now for equations that include theta. Let me know if it works for you!

mlukaszek 13 days ago

It's pretty good! It did quite well when asked a variant of "when do the trains meet" problem, although it used different values for speed than what I told it to use (and what it actually used in textual response: 120km/h and 20km/h in video vs 80km/h and 60km/h in the prompt and textual response).

https://math-gpt.org/?video_id=a7489ec5-b06e-480a-96c4-27765...

If it did the animations in 3Blue1Brown style, that would be cherry on the top! ;-)

Edit: I did notice it uses Manim, it just doesn't have the same feeling

  • xenonite 13 days ago

    Sadly the resulting calculation is wrong (190/140≠1.5)

    • mlukaszek 12 days ago

      Haha I did not even register that as I expected 1.5 as the answer...

bassrattle 14 days ago

As a test, I input a2b2. It interpretted that as a^2xb^2 which is fine but it kept pronouncing "A squared" as "a square" (more phonetically, "uh square")

For a tool meant to enlighten, hearing "a square be square" was confusing.

Alifatisk 13 days ago

I am so happy tools like these gets created and is available for free.

When growing up, I had difficulty learning math and I wasn't able to ask my parents for help so much. That is when I found PhotoMath, it changed my life, it became my second teacher and it was for free! I don't think Google even owned it at the time.

I remember being very scared of losing it one day. Luckily that never happened, but I will never forget how much these math tools helped me growing up.

8n4vidtmkvmk 13 days ago

Neat, but I think I'd like it better if you simplified it and dropped the focus on teaching students. What I'd prefer is a slightly smarter WolframAlpha that doesn't force me to learn their weird syntax. Let me ask my math question in English, you turn that into a formula and just give me the solution. I don't need the explanation.

The video generation is overly ambitious. Some of them come out wonky and wrong.

pino999 13 days ago

I don't know, it is still chatgpt. I wouldn't let it near homework soon. I do enjoy the latex rendering.

Anyway it can't even solve x mod 66 = 3 (answer: x = 3 + 66k, where k = 0, 1, ...)

Somehow it thinks the answer is 32 and it comes with a huge blob of shit.

fph 13 days ago

Very neat! Can created content be reused freely by teachers? Do you require attribution? I am interested in tikz plots more than in videos, personally.

freakynit 14 days ago

Holy cow this is insanely wonderful. Extremely beautiful explanation of concepts. The generated videos are like professionally hard-crafted. Great work!

  • j_bum 14 days ago

    Any examples? I’ve tried several prompts and get errors each time the plotting begins

    • freakynit 13 days ago

      I tried following:

      1. Eigenvalues and eigenvectors

      2. Principal component analysis

      3. Low rank matrices

IndieCoder 14 days ago

Kudos for the UI, very nice to see the seamless integration of formulas, graphs and videos!

vivzkestrel 13 days ago

it says .org in the domain. Is this a "for-profit" privately operated company or some experiment with GPT? did you guys build your own proprietary model or is it using some open source LLM model?

sprobertson 12 days ago

Very cool, how does it work? (even if just at a high level)

Jzush 12 days ago

I tried it on a simple problem and generated the video thinking I would get a video that would go through the steps of division. Instead it said "Let's take number XX and divide it by number YY using a calculator to get the result ZZ".

I'm thinking, wait a tick, you're the calculator. Weren't you supposed to show your work? It's that literally the point?

It's a funny utility but I'm not sure it's all that useful.