Hey HN! We’re Shraman and Shreyas Kar, building Golpo (https://video.golpoai.com), an AI generator for whiteboard-style explainer videos, capable of creating videos from any document or prompt.

We’ve always made videos to communicate any concept and felt like it was the clearest way to communicate. But making good videos was time-consuming and tedious. It required planning, scripting, recording, editing, syncing voice with visuals. Even a 2-minute video could take hours.

AI video tools are impressive at generating cinematic scenes and flashy content, but struggle to explain a product demo, walk through a complex workflow, or teach a technical topic. People still spend hours making explainer videos manually because existing AI tools aren’t built for learning or clarity.

Our solution is Golpo. Our video generation engine generates time-aligned graphics with spoken narration that are good for onboarding, training, product walkthroughs, and education. It’s fast, scalable, and built from the ground up to help people understand complex ideas through simple storytelling.

Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_LGM0dEyDA#t=7.

Golpo is built specifically for use cases involving explaining, learning, and onboarding. In our (obviously biased!) opinion, it feels authentic and engaging in a way no other AI video generator does.

Golpo can generate videos in over 190 languages. After it generates a video, you can fully customize its animations by just describing the changes you want to see in each motion graphic it generates in natural language.

It was challenging to get this to work! Initially, we used a code-generation approach with Manim, where we fine-tuned a language model to emit Python animation scripts directly from the input text. While promising for small examples, this quickly became brittle, and the generated code usually contained broken imports, unsupported transforms, and poor timing alignment between narration and visuals. Debugging and regenerating these scripts was often slower than creating them manually.

We also explored training a custom diffusion-based video model, but found it impractical for our needs. Diffusion could produce high-fidelity cinematic scenes, but generating coherent sequences beyond about 30 seconds was unreliable without complex stitching, making edits required regenerating large portions of the video, and visuals frequently drifted from the instructional intent, especially for abstract or technical topics. Also, we did not have the compute to scale this.

Existing state-of-the-art systems like Sora and Veo 3 face similar limitations: they are optimized for cinematic storytelling, not step-by-step educational content, and they lack both the deterministic control needed for time-aligned narration and the scalability for 5–10 minute explainers.

In the end, we took a different path of training a reinforcement learning agent to “draw” whiteboard strokes, step-by-step, optimized for clear, human-like explanations. This worked well because the action space was simple and the environment was not overly complex, allowing the agent to learn efficient, precise, and consistent drawing behaviors.

Here are some sample videos that Golpo generated:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33xNoWHYZGA (Whiteboard Gym - the tech behind Golpo itself)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w_ZwKhptUqI (How do RNNs work?)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxFKo-2sWCM (function pointers in C)

https://golpo-podcast-inputs.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/file... (basic intro to Gödel's theorem)

You can try Golpo here: https://video.golpoai.com, and we will set you up with 2 credits. We’d love your feedback, especially on what feels off, what you’d want to control, and how you might use it. Comments welcome!

If that demo video is how it actually works, this is a pretty amazing technical feat. I’m definitely going to try this out.

Edit: I've used. It's amazing. I'm going to be using this a lot.

My suggestion would be to re-think the demo videos. I have only watched most of the way into the "function pointers in C" example. If I didn't already know C well, I would not be able to follow that. The technical diagrams don't stay on the screen long enough for new learners to process the information. These videos probably look fantastic to the person who wrote the document it summarizes, but to a newbie the information is fleeting and hard to follow. The machine doesn't understand that the screen shouldn't be completely wiped all the time while it follows the narrative. Some visuals should be static for paragraphs, or stay visible while detail marked up around it. For a true master of the art, see 3blue1brown.

Wow, I was skeptical at first, but the result was pretty awesome!

Congrats! Cool product.

Feedback: I tried making a product explainer video for a tree planting rover I’m working on. The rover looked different in every scene. I can imagine this kind of consistency may be more difficult to get right. Maybe if I had uploaded a photo of how the rover looks it may have helped. In one scene the rover looks like an actual rover, in the other it looks like a humanoid robot.

But still, super impressed!

Going by the example videos, this is nothing like I'd expect a whiteboard video to look like. It fills the slides in erratically, even text. No human does that. It's distracting more than anything. If a human teacher wants to show cause-and-effect, they'll draw the cause, then an arrow, then the effect to emphasize what they're saying. Your videos resemble printing more than drawing.

Love this idea! The Whiteboard Gym explainer video seemed really text-heavy (although I did learn enough to guess that that's because text likely beat drawing/adding an image for these abstract concepts for the GRPO agent). I found Shraman's personal story video much more engaging! https://x.com/ShramanKar/status/1955404430943326239

Signed up and waiting on a video :)

Edit: here's a 58s explainer video for the concept of body doubling: https://video.golpoai.com/share/448557cc-cf06-4cad-9fb2-f56b...

Love it. The tone is just right. A couple of suggestions:

Have you tried a "filled line" approach, rather than "outlined" strokes? Might feel more like individual marker strokes.

I made a demo video on the free tier and it did a great job explaining acoustic delay lines in an accessible fashion, after feeding it a catalog PDF with an overview of the historical artefact and photography of an example unit. Unfortunately the service invented its own idea of what the artefact looked like. Could you offer a storyboard view and let users erase the incorrect parts and sketch their own shapes? Or split the drawing up into logical elements and the user could redraw them as needed, which would then be reused where that element is used in other frames?

I love the concept but the implementation in the demo seem not good enough to me. I think the black and white demo is quite ugly... 1) Explainer videos are not in black and white 2) the images are not drawn live usually. 3) text being drawn on the go is just a fake animation. In reality most explainer videos show short meaningful sentence appearing all at once so the user has more time for reading me.

Keep up refining the generated demo! Best of luck

I have used AI in the past to learn a topic but by creating a GUI with input sliders and output that I can see how things change when I change parameters, this could work here where people can basically ask "what if x happens" and see the result which also makes them feel in control of the learning

Feedback on the text: I find the way that the text generates randomly across the line very distracting because I (and I think most people) read from left to right. Having letters appear randomly is much more difficult to follow.

Are there options to have the text appear differently?

Can you share the paper mentioned in the demo video?

This is neat but I wasn’t able to get it to work (server overloaded is what the browser app said) I’d also recommend registering a custom domain in Supabase so the Google SSO shows the golpo domain - which is a small, but professional-signaling affordance

The generated graphic in the linked demo for "Training materials that captivate" is a sketch of someone looking forlorn while holding a piece of paper. Is there a way to do in-line edits to the generated result to polish out things like this?

Pretty cool, especially the voice and background music - feels just right.

I asked it about pointers in Rust. The transcript and images were great, very approachable!

"Do not let your computer sleep" -> is this using GPU on my machine or something?

Impressive. Reminds me of Google NotebookLLMs AI generated podcasts of PDFs.

I'm sure someone else has mentioned this but your video on the main page correctly has GRPO the first time it's introduced but then every time you mention it after that -- you've swapped it to GPRO.

This is really interesting, definitely going to give it a try! Seems fun but are you seeing people actually needing to make lots of videos like this? What's your vision - how does this become really big?

This is actually pretty amazing. Not only does it work, it’s good. At least from the demo videos. YMMV.

What I always wanted to do was to teach what I know but I lack the time commitment to get it out. This might be a way…

I threw the user docs for my open source project in there and it was... surprisingly not terrible!

Note: Your paywall for downloading the video is easily bypassed by Inspect Element :)

My main concern for you is that y'all will get Sherlocked by OpenAI/Anthropic/Google.

Planning to add links as input anytime soon?

I would love to add a link to my product docs, upload some images and have it generate an onboarding video of the platform.

Hey also, if you want to suggest a video, we could try generating one and reply here with a link! Just tell us what you want the video to be about!!

So... if I had the enterprise accounts for various LLM services, could I dupe this company with a basic upload page and a nice big prompt?

I'll try the 1 free generation soon, but the way the text appears randomly in that landing page demo video is really weird. I keep loosing track of where I'm reading too as the audio sometimes is not perfectly synced. The sync is not that bad however, but it could be better.

I have 2 credits but it won't let me generate a video. Founders, if you are around, you may want to debug.

I created a video on the free tier, the shareable link didn't work (404), I upgraded to be able to download it, and it seems to have disappeared? It says "Still generating" in my Library.

The video UUID starts with "f5fbd6c7", hopefully that's sufficient to identify me!

That worked. Really well!

But, white on black is really ugly. Even black on white or a simple inversion would be an improvement.

I think it could benefit from the ability to pause and see the transcript, and make edits before the video is generated.

The way text is appears is so weird, is like rendering a by plotting each letter aschronously. I wonder how it compares to auto generated power point presentations. I suspect it might be worse

Where I can find what is a credit? It says 150 credits for a Growth plan but doesn't explain how many credits are needed for a single video

p.s. the pricing section is unreadable under the 840px width

Popup window with "Load Failed" after it had some progress on the bar past 40% or so. Shows up in the library, but won't play. I just deleted it for now.

Congrats on the launch!

If I may ask - how do you generate your audio?

The creator tier ($99.99/mo) lists "15 seconds" as a perk. Does this mean the maximum video length is 15 seconds?

it created this video for an app I am working on. https://video.golpoai.com/share/8de80271-1109-48e4-ac52-9265...

Do you have a developer api that empowers developers to create explainer videos?

Did NotebookLM just come out with this? Very tough to compete with google.

Very cool: what output format is the model producing?

Straight vector paths?

Has anyone tried prompting VEO to create these videos

So it eats concepts and makes videos?

One is reminded of smbc

https://www.seekpng.com/png/detail/213-2132749_gulpo-decal-f...

someone needs to do something about the purple darkmode rounded corner tailwind style that has infected all LLMs now.

cool product though!

I want to pay 20usd just to troll my friends with explainer videos on why they're shit at video games :D

From one Kar to another, দূর্দান্ত গল্প Congratulations.

In the Khan academy videos I remember watching, an instructor would actually write on a tablet; you'd see each letter get hand-written one by one in order. Is there no way to get it to do that? What the AI is doing instead is building-up the strokes of every character on the line of text all at once, which looks completely unnatural. The awkwardness is compounded by the fact that the letters are outlined, so it takes even more steps to create them.

In addition, the line-art style of the illustrations looks like that same cartoonish-AI-slop style I see everywhere now. I just can't take it seriously.

If this tool is widely deployed it's just going to get used to spread more misinformation. I'm sure it will be great for bad actors and spammers to have yet another tool in their toolbox to spread whatever weird content or messages they want. But for the rest of us, that means search engines and YouTube and other places will be filled with a million AI-generated half-baked inferior copies of Khan Academy. It's already hard enough to find good educational resources online if you don't know where to look, and this will only make the problem worse.

You'll just have to forgive me if I'm not really excited about this tool.

...also the name is a bit weird. It reminds me of "Gulpo, the fish who eats concepts" from that classic SMBC cartoon. (https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/2010-12-15)

I've tried it and it is really cool. Well done and good luck.

I made it 8 seconds into the "function pointers in C" video and immediately stopped. It went too fast to read the code examples and diagrams. (second "slide" appears for 1 second.. and what is that array it is showing?) If you go back and look at the code (a three line swap function) - it's messed up. No opening bracket and where is the closing bracket? It is "swaps first and last", but hard-coded to only length 3 arrays?

I'm sure AI could help make good animations like this, but this looks like slop.

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I feel like this is another case of throwing AI in a non-AI-required problem. Khan Academy itself just hired people to make its videos at a very reasonable wage. Why would you need to add AI into the equation? If you wanted to, you could build a platform of basic video / whiteboard content creators at a very reasonable price point.