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24 alternatives to Simply explain 20k concepts using GPT

Hi HN! I made a tool that autogenerates simple, high-level explanations of concepts and organizes them in a somewhat university course-like structure so that it's easier to see how things are structured. Currently it has about 20,000 concepts on a range of topics but that's just what I generated so far, it should work with more obscure topics in the future. I love learning about random topics where I don't have a good background in like history or linguistics, but it's hard to figure out what topics there (you don't know what you don't know) are in certain fields and what they are even…

Simply Explain is a tool that uses GPT to generate plain-language explanations of concepts and organizes them in a university course-like structure. It currently covers approximately 20,000 concepts across various… Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes. Simply explain 20k concepts using GPT launched in 2023; newer entries below may have overtaken it.

  1. 1

    heyo! Explainpaper lets you upload a research paper PDF. If you don't understand a formula or sentence, just highlight it and the tool explains it for you I built this a few weeks ago to help me read a neuroscience paper, and it works pretty well! I didn't fine-tune GPT-3, but I do take a lot of context from the paper and feed that into the prompt (not the whole paper). Ppl have uploaded AI, biology, economics, philosophy papers and even law documents. Works in Chinese, Japanese, Spanish, French and more as well!

    2022 · explainpaper.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2IM

    Hi everyone! I’m the founder of Explanations (https://explanations.app). I’m building a website where students can get college level math & physics help for 1/10th the cost of private tutoring. You’d type a question, and your teacher replies by drawing a Youtube/KhanAcademy-style video; and this happens asynchronously throughout the week. When I was studying at MIT, I often had to wait 40-60 minutes in line just to get 5 minutes of “help” from a TA - when I needed 1-2 hours. I understood that TAs can’t spend all their time helping me. That’s understandable. But what made…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Learn math and science with interactive visual explanations

    Mar 2026 · openai.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4
    Gist AI▲646

    Free website, YouTube, PDF summarizer, powered by ChatGPT

    2023 · gistai.tech · its alternatives →

  5. 5MI

    very much inspired by karpathy's microgpt of the same name. it's (by default) a 4000 param GPT/LLM/NN that learns to generate names. this is sorta an educational tool in that you can visualize the activations as they pass through the network, and click on things to get an explanation of them.

    Feb 2026 · microgpt.boratto.ca · its alternatives →

  6. 6EP
  7. 7DQ

    Hello fellow hackers, we made a site that gets GPT to answer your question using the info on a webpage you specify or document you upload (e.g., a large textbook .pdf file). Background: When ChatGPT came out, I had the idea of having it pull answers from my stereo receiver's annoyingly dense 32 page manual. My weekend project prototype proceeded to surprise with great answers—just like what we've all experienced by now. My co-founder thought we should productize it, and make it easy to use online. So here we are with a very early beta! (Try it on a HN thread...)

    2023 · klavier.ai · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Hi HN, As a developer, I much prefer to write code than read other people’s code. But most projects I work on involve other developers so it’s hard to avoid. Often I find it really hard to quickly parse other people’s code so I thought maybe ChatGPT could help. ChatGPT does a really nice job of giving clear explanations when you paste in code and ask it to explain it. But the interface is a bit of a pain to use if you’re using it many times a day. It’s also hard to share explanations with co-workers. So I built whatdoesthiscodedo.com. Just paste your code and get your ChatGPT explanation and…

    2023 · whatdoesthiscodedo.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9

    Hi HN, I'm Ben, a solo developer. I've just launched ELI5 GPT: https://explaintome.netlify.app, a simple tool that utilizes GPT to explain anything in very simple terms — as if you're 5 years old. I built it because I was tired of having to Google explanations for tech topics that were either too complex or filled with jargon. I wanted something minimal, fast, and fun — no logins, no bloat. It's built with plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, hosted on Netlify. You can enter any concept (e.g., "quantum physics" or "inflation") and it'll explain it at a childlike level using AI. It’s…

    2025 · explaintome.netlify.app · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    Hi HN: I published part one of my free NLP course. The course is intended to help anyone who knows Python and a bit of math go from the very basics all the way to today's mainstream models and frameworks. I strive to balance theory and practice and so every module consists of detailed explanations and slides along with a Colab notebook (in most modules) putting the theory into practice. In part one, we cover text preprocessing, how to turn text into numbers, and multiple ways to classify and search text using "classical" approaches. And along the way, we'll pick up useful bits on how to use…

    2022 · nlpdemystified.org · its alternatives →

  11. 11NL

    Link: https://www.nlpdemystified.org/ Hi HN: After a year of work, I've published my free NLP course. The course helps anyone who knows Python and a bit of math go from the basics to today's mainstream models and frameworks. I strive to balance theory and practice, so every module consists of detailed explanations and slides along with a Colab notebook putting the ideas into practice (in most modules). The notebooks cover how to accomplish everyday NLP tasks including extracting key information, document search, text similarity, text classification, finding topics in…

    2022 · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    Trellis▲187

    ChatGPT and GPT-3-powered textbook companion and tutor

    2023 · timnas4dking.net · its alternatives →

  13. 13IM

    Hi, I'm a high school teacher from Australia and I've built what I'd like to think is a pretty nifty ChatGPT powered presentation tool for teachers. I'd love it if you could have a look at it and give me some of your feedback. I don't think there's much overlap with the HN crowd and school teachers, but I've been coming here for many years and thought I'd post here and see what you all think. Check it out if you have a minute and I'd be super happy to hear your feedback too. https://www.slidehero.ai/ You can jump in and have a play with the tool all you like ;) Cheers, Eli

    2025 · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    Highlight any text to instantly translate and explain it.

    2025 · explaintxt.com · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Understanding scientific articles can be tough, even in your own field. Trying to comprehend articles from others? Good luck. Enter, Now I Get It! I made this app for curious people. Simply upload an article and after a few minutes you'll have an interactive web page showcasing the highlights. Generated pages are stored in the cloud and can be viewed from a gallery. Now I Get It! uses the best LLMs out there, which means the app will improve as AI improves. Free for now - it's capped at 20 articles per day so I don't burn cash. A few things I (and maybe you will) find interesting: * This is…

    Feb 2026 · nowigetit.us · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Teach yourself anything, create boutique AI generated guides

    2023 · its alternatives →

  17. 17
    the:gist▲299

    Automating Notion shouldn't be expensive and complicated

    2021 · its alternatives →

  18. 18
    Unfold▲275

    Generate interactive courses on any topic

    Nov 2025 · 45d.ai · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hi HN! I've found this visualization tool immensely helpful over the years for getting an intuition for how an LLM "sees" some piece of text, and with a bit of elbow grease decided to move all compute to client side so I could make it publicly available. I've found it particularly useful for - Understanding exactly how repetition and patterns affect a small LM's ability to predict correctly - Understanding different tokenization patterns and how it affects model output - Getting a general sense of how "hard" different prediction tasks are for GPT-style models Known problems (that I probably…

    2023 · perplexity.vercel.app · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    GPT3-powered summaries of long YouTube videos

    2022 · summarize.tech · its alternatives →

  21. 21YS

    Hi, I'm Alex. I created Eightify to take my mind off things during a weekend, but I was surprised that my friends were genuinely interested in it. I kept going, and now it's been nine weeks since I started. I got the idea to summarize videos when my friend sent me a lengthy video again. This happens to me often; the video title is so enticing, and then it turns out to be nothing. I had been working with GPT for 6 months by the time, so everything looked like a nail to me. It's a Chrome extension, and I'm offering 5 free tries for videos under an hour. After that, you have to buy a package.…

    2023 · eightify.app · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    What inspired this project today was watching this amazing video by 3Blue1Brown called "But what is a GPT?" on Youtube (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wjZofJX0v4M - I highly recommend watching it). I added it to the repo for reference. When it clicked in my head that "knowing a fact" is nearly synonymous with predicting a word (or series of words), I wanted to put it to the test, because it seemed so simple. I chose JavaScript because I can exploit the way it structures objects to aid in the modeling of language. For example: "I want to be at the beach", "I will do it later",…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  23. 23MC

    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.

    2024 · math-gpt.org · its alternatives →

  24. 24

    We make complex topics easy to understand

    2023 · bj88indo.co · its alternatives →

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