Thanks to a TikTok video that went viral, 26th graders Nour Gajial and Yanni Kouloumbis are up to something good with MathGPT.
In the TikTok, Gadzial asks viewers to “imagine if Chegg and ChatGPT had a baby,” introducing the math learning platform. He then shows how students can take a screenshot of a math problem and upload it to MathGPT to receive “instant answers with crystal clear instructions.” Gadzial's TikTok reached over 1.5 million viewers and was shared by over 60,000 students.
Ghazial and Kurumbis say they created MathGPT to help struggling high school and college students understand how to tackle math problems step-by-step. Through easy-to-understand explanations, MathGPT aims to build a solid foundation of conceptual understanding for each student.
“The main purpose of the platform is not to get answers. That's almost trivial,” Krumbis said. “We want students to have a well-rounded understanding of math when they use our site. We want to be the only place students go when they have a math problem.”
In addition to explaining solutions to math problems, the site's chat area acts as a kind of math tutor, providing students with practice problems like the one they just solved.
Ghaziar and Kurumbis, both computer science majors in the College of Engineering, said they had extensive experience with large-scale language models (LLMs) before ChatGPT came along.
“The conventional wisdom at the time was that these models couldn’t do the math very well, but GPT-4 actually does it pretty well, and at least points you in the right direction,” Kouloumbis says. But GPT-4 still doesn’t show you the steps it takes to get to the answer, and it’s not always accurate, Gajial says.
To make the platform more accurate, we leverage custom prompts and thousands of problems, and we incorporate advanced search techniques that use “Few-Shot Learning,” a machine learning technique that allows AI models to learn from labeled training data. We also came up with a way to ensure that LLM can understand LaTeX math symbols in problems (like those pesky Greek letters, less-than and greater-than symbols) and use them in the answers.
To spread the word about MathGPT, the co-founders have taken to TikTok (where they currently have nearly 1,800 followers) and spent time in math servers on the social platform Discord, showing students how easy it is to find support on MathGPT.
“There were tens of thousands of people in these Discord servers offering math help, and it was all done manually,” Kouloumbis said, where he and Gajial showed users how MathGPT could solve the same problems automatically.
Ghaziar and Krumbis felt supported by various entrepreneurial organizations on campus. They regularly attended Thursday night Startup Hour hosted by the Life Changing Lab, where they met many other student entrepreneurs. They also received a Beck Fellowship and a Canaan Fellowship to work on their business. They also received support from Nancy Alman at Cornell's Blackstone Launchpad, who helped them connect with alumni and encouraged them to make strategic hires for their team.
This summer, they're working on building out other areas on the site that will offer help with physics, statistics and accounting. They're also creating AI-generated videos to accompany their solutions and allowing students to watch on-demand videos about their problems.
To date, over 3.5 million problems have been submitted to the platform, and 385,000 people have created MathGPT accounts to receive free support every day. Users can purchase a subscription to get unlimited math support.
“We want to give students all the resources they need to solve problems and understand how they work,” Gadzial said. “We want them to feel confident and to help as many people as they can.”
