Put YouTube videos into your knowledge base
Talks, tutorials and product videos hold knowledge your AI cannot reach. Load their transcripts with timed segments into your vector database, and your assistant can answer from them and cite the exact minute. The sample is a real transcript of Andrej Karpathy’s one-hour “Intro to Large Language Models” talk.
In the sample · recorded October 21, 2026
- Video length
- 1 h 0 min
- Words in the transcript
- 12,151
- Words per minute
- 203
- Timed segments
- 452
- Chapters
- 21
Counted from the 1 result of one real run below. They describe this sample, not the whole market.
RAG knowledge base
Why it works.
Segments are natural chunks: each has a start and end time, so every answer can link back to the moment in the video. That makes answers checkable, which is the point of retrieval in the first place.
Video metadata (title, channel, duration) goes into the chunk metadata, so you can filter by source and show a proper citation next to the answer.
Who uses it
- Developers building RAG and AI search
- Companies indexing their own webinars and tutorials
- Research teams building a searchable video archive
Real sample
What the tool returned.
Transcript of “[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models” by Andrej Karpathy.
[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models
Andrej Karpathy
- 0:00hi everyone so recently I gave a 30-minute talk on large language models just kind of like an intro talk um unfortunately that talk was not recorded
- 0:08but a lot of people came to me after the talk and they told me that uh they really liked the talk so I would just I thought I would just re-record it and basically put it up on YouTube so here
- 0:16we go the busy person's intro to large language models director Scott okay so let's begin first of all what is a large
- 0:24language model really well a large language model is just two files right um there will be two files in this hypothetical directory so for example
- 0:33working with a specific example of the Llama 270b model this is a large language model released by meta Ai and
- 0:41this is basically the Llama series of language models the second iteration of it and this is the 70 billion parameter
- 0:47model of uh of this series so there's multiple models uh belonging to the
- 0:54Llama 2 Series uh 7 billion um 13 billion 34 billion and 70 billion is the biggest one now many people like this
Chapters
- 0:00Chapter 1: Intro: Large Language Model (LLM) talk
- 0:20Chapter 2: LLM Inference
- 4:17Chapter 3: LLM Training
- 8:58Chapter 4: LLM dreams
- 11:22Chapter 5: How do they work?
- 14:14Chapter 6: Finetuning into an Assistant
- 17:52Chapter 7: Summary so far
- 21:05Chapter 8: Appendix: Comparisons, Labeling docs, RLHF, Synthetic data, Leaderboard
- 25:43Chapter 9: LLM Scaling Laws
- 27:43Chapter 10: Tool Use (Browser, Calculator, Interpreter, DALL-E)
- 33:32Chapter 11: Multimodality (Vision, Audio)
- 35:00Chapter 12: Thinking, System 1/2
Input and raw JSON
The request body we sent. Long texts and lists in the result are shortened for this page.
{
"videos": [
"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g"
]
}{
"videoId": "zjkBMFhNj_g",
"url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zjkBMFhNj_g",
"title": "[1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models",
"channelName": "Andrej Karpathy",
"channelUrl": "https://www.youtube.com/@AndrejKarpathy",
"durationSeconds": 3590,
"language": null,
"languageMatched": true,
"text": "hi everyone so recently I gave a 30-minute talk on large language models just kind of like an intro talk um unfortunately that talk was not recorded but a lot of people came to me after the talk and they told me that uh they really liked the talk so I would just I thought I would just re-record it and basically put it up on YouTube so here we go the busy person's intro to large language models director Scott okay so let's begin first of all what is a large language model really well a large language model is just two files right um there will be two files in this hypothetical directory so for example working with a specific example of the Llama 270b model this is a large language model released by meta Ai and this is basically the Llama series of language models the second iteration of it…",
"wordCount": 12151,
"segments": [
{
"start": 0,
"end": 8.48,
"text": "hi everyone so recently I gave a 30-minute talk on large language models just kind of like an intro talk um unfortunately that talk was not recorded"
},
{
"start": 8,
"end": 16.92,
"text": "but a lot of people came to me after the talk and they told me that uh they really liked the talk so I would just I thought I would just re-record it and basically put it up on YouTube so here"
},
{
"start": 16,
"end": 24.599,
"text": "we go the busy person's intro to large language models director Scott okay so let's begin first of all what is a large"
},
{
"start": 24,
"end": 33.16,
"text": "language model really well a large language model is just two files right um there will be two files in this hypothetical directory so for example"
},
{
"start": 33,
"end": 41.399,
"text": "working with a specific example of the Llama 270b model this is a large language model released by meta Ai and"
},
{
"start": 41,
"end": 47.76,
"text": "this is basically the Llama series of language models the second iteration of it and this is the 70 billion parameter"
},
{
"start": 47,
"end": 54.199,
"text": "model of uh of this series so there's multiple models uh belonging to the"
},
{
"start": 54,
"end": 62.28,
"text": "Llama 2 Series uh 7 billion um 13 billion 34 billion and 70 billion is the biggest one now many people like this"
},
{
"start": 62,
"end": 70.56,
"text": "model specifically because it is probably today the most powerful open weights model so basically the weights and the architecture and a paper was all"
},
{
"start": 70,
"end": 78.68,
"text": "released by meta so anyone can work with this model very easily uh by themselves uh this is unlike many other language models that you might be familiar with"
},
{
"start": 78,
"end": 86.24,
"text": "for example if you're using chat GPT or something like that uh the model architecture was never released it is owned by open aai and you're allowed to"
},
{
"start": 86,
"end": 95.28,
"text": "use the language model through a web interface but you don't have actually access to that model so in this case the Llama 270b model is really just two"
}
],
"chapters": [
{
"title": "Chapter 1: Intro: Large Language Model (LLM) talk",
"start": 0
},
{
"title": "Chapter 2: LLM Inference",
"start": 20
},
{
"title": "Chapter 3: LLM Training",
"start": 257
},
{
"title": "Chapter 4: LLM dreams",
"start": 538
},
{
"title": "Chapter 5: How do they work?",
"start": 682
},
{
"title": "Chapter 6: Finetuning into an Assistant",
"start": 854
},
{
"title": "Chapter 7: Summary so far",
"start": 1072
},
{
"title": "Chapter 8: Appendix: Comparisons, Labeling docs, RLHF, Synthetic data, Leaderboard",
"start": 1265
},
{
"title": "Chapter 9: LLM Scaling Laws",
"start": 1543
},
{
"title": "Chapter 10: Tool Use (Browser, Calculator, Interpreter, DALL-E)",
"start": 1663
},
{
"title": "Chapter 11: Multimodality (Vision, Audio)",
"start": 2012
},
{
"title": "Chapter 12: Thinking, System 1/2",
"start": 2100
}
],
"scrapedAt": "2026-10-21T06:31:41.071Z"
}The fields that matter
What to look at first.
| Field | Why it matters here | In the sample |
|---|---|---|
| Segmentssegments | Timed chunks to embed, each with start and end. | 452 entries |
| Texttext | The full text if you prefer your own chunking. | hi everyone so recently I gave a 30-minute talk on large language mod… |
| Video idvideoId | A stable id to deduplicate and link back. | zjkBMFhNj_g |
| Titletitle | Chunk metadata for citations. | [1hr Talk] Intro to Large Language Models |
Free tool
Try it with a video you want to index
- 01Send your video links to the API, up to 200 per run.
- 02Embed the segments, with video id, title and start time as metadata.
- 03Answer questions from the retrieved segments and link the timestamp.
Press “Run free” and the real result shows up here, exactly what your agent gets back.
Ask your agent
Or just ask.
“Fetch transcripts for these 50 video links and save the segments as JSON lines.”
“Index this channel’s tutorials so I can ask questions about them.”
“Answer from the indexed videos and cite the video and minute for every claim.”
Connect the tool to Claude, Cursor or any MCP client with your key and ask in plain words; your agent picks the tool by itself. Setup takes a minute: MCP guide. Prefer code? See the YouTube Transcripts API.
What it costs
Pay per result.
1credit for this sample
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Questions
Good to know.
What chunk size should I use?
Segments are short, so most teams merge consecutive segments into chunks of a few hundred words and keep the first start time as the citation.
How many videos can I send at once?
Up to 200 transcripts per API run: set maxResults, the default is 20. Videos without a transcript are skipped and not charged.
Can I keep the knowledge base up to date?
Yes. Run new videos as they come out; each video is a separate result, so you only add what is new.
Related
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