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Comment by folkrav | Hacker News Reader

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. 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?

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I briefly worked as a Uni lecturer, and I completely agree.

Universities have made the mistake of competing with YouTube (video lectures), whereas what they can actually offer is direct access to domain experts.

I am skeptical that any other solution has much of a moat. So if the creators of this are after any feedback, I would offer that their best bet is to be competitive on User Experience, rather than underlying technology.

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.

> 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.

I have a hard time believing you've genuinely never had a lecturer take questions. I also genuinely have a hard time believing that last sentence is not, at best, a not-so-subtle attempt at putting my social awareness into question, or at worst, just being insulting for the sake of it.

> I have a hard time believing you've genuinely never had a lecturer take questions.

It was very very rare in my experience, from grade school all the way to harvard, and unless you went to some crazy exclusive school with something like a 10:1 teacher student ratio it was pretty normal. It was also very rare for just practical reasons, like the lecturer needed the full time without interruptions because of class schedules.

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