Cyberiad Labs Save my seat

AI skills beat years of experience. Learn them for free.

Learn how to use AI, ask properly, spot when AI is making things up, and prove which way of asking wins. Become more efficient and bulletproof your career.

Built by the Holberton co-founder (1.6M+ learners at ALX).

20 days until Cohort 1 of Introduction to AI and LLMs starts on Monday 14 September 2026

  • $0
  • No code

206 of 1,000 seats left

Why learn this

71% of business leaders would rather hire the less experienced person with AI skills than the more experienced one without.

Whether you use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok, the evidence points one way: people who put generative AI to work finish more work, do better work, and are the people business leaders now say they would hire first.

  • 71%

    Hiring has already turned

    Microsoft and LinkedIn asked business leaders in 2024: 71% would rather take a less experienced person with AI skills than a more experienced one without, and 66% would not hire someone without them at all.

    Microsoft and LinkedIn, Work Trend Index 2024
  • 40%

    Better work, not just faster work

    More than 700 consultants in a Harvard and BCG experiment produced work nearly 40% better with GPT-4, OpenAI's most capable model at the time, on tasks it is good at, and worse on tasks it is not.

    MIT Sloan on the Harvard and BCG field experiment
  • 34%

    Beginners gain the most

    5,179 customer support agents were given a generative AI assistant in a Stanford and MIT study. Output rose 14% on average, and 34% for the newest workers, the biggest lift in the study.

    Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond, Generative AI at Work
  • 62%

    The pay gap is open and widening

    PwC's 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer: jobs asking for AI skills pay 62% more on average than the same job without them, up from 57% the year before, and they are growing more than seven times as fast as the jobs market.

    PwC, Global AI Jobs Barometer 2026

The above four studies point the same way: people who get real work out of these tools come out ahead. The skill of doing that on purpose is called prompt engineering: no code, just knowing what to ask, what to trust, how to measure, and where the machine stops being good. This is what we are going to teach you.

Open now

Introduction to AI and LLMs. Your first four weeks.

During this first course, you will learn how your favourite AI app works, whether that is ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok, and what it does with what you type. You will install a free open-weight model on your own phone or computer, run it with the internet off, and use it as your control group. You will learn the basics of prompting: clarity, context, examples, zero-shot, one-shot and few-shot, and how to measure which way of asking wins. By the end, AI stops being a slot machine and starts being an efficiency tool you use every day.

What you are reserving

The course
Introduction to AI and LLMs. Everyone starts here, and it is the course your seat is in.
The dates
Monday 14 September to Friday 9 October 2026. Four teaching weeks, start to finish.
Your week
Four sessions of 90 minutes, then Day 5 for the weekly quiz, the wrap-up and catching up.
The time
16 sessions of 90 minutes, which is 24 hours of teaching.
The price
Nothing. The first 1,000 seats are free, there is no card to reserve one, and no card afterwards.

Save my seat

Free. No card. Cohort 1 starts Monday 14 September 2026.

Who is behind this

Meet the founders

This course is written and run by two people who deeply care about education and helping people.

The team
  1. Julien Barbier

    Julien Barbier

    Co-founder.

    Julien co-founded Holberton School, a software engineering school that ran with no teachers, no lectures and no upfront tuition. It grew from one campus in San Francisco to 32 worldwide before the company was acquired.

    He then led product and growth at ALX across its applied AI and software engineering programmes, where the platform went from a few thousand learners to more than 1.6 million.

    Before that he was the first head of marketing, growth and community at Docker, in Silicon Valley, joining when the company was still dotCloud.

    He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in software engineering and computer science from Epitech, the European Institute of Technology, in Paris. He is a Wall Street Journal and USA Today best-selling author, was listed on Vanity Fair's Future Innovator Index, and was named one of the top United States chief executives in education.

  2. Youssef Charif Hamidi

    Youssef Charif Hamidi

    Co-founder.

    Youssef is a full-stack engineer and the co-founder of RemoteOtter, a remote job platform. He also built MathVellum, a maths editor for people who cannot hold a pen, which turns ordinary typing into properly set mathematical notation.

    He finished a twelve-month software engineering programme on an Android tablet. Cerebral palsy limits him to about two words a minute on a computer keyboard, so he did the whole thing on a device he could actually use.

    He holds certificates in software engineering and AI from ALX Africa, where he learned to code on one of Julien's programmes. He has worked with Julien on several highly technical projects, such as a Solana pool arbitrage bot.

    His passion is poetry. He won First Prize in the foreign-languages category of Morocco's National Young Poets Competition, awarded at the Rabat International Book Fair.

Before this one

Nobody has written about Cyberiad Labs yet, but Holberton, the school Julien co-founded, was covered by these publications and more.

  • The New York Times
  • FrenchWeb
  • Forbes
  • Financial Times
  • La Tribune
  • Fortune
  • ZDNet
  • Le Monde Informatique
  • Fast Company
  • World Economic Forum
  • Les Echos
  • TechCrunch
  • Challenges
  • Forbes Afrique

Who it is for

You do not need to be a software engineer.

Nobody writes a line of code in this course. If you can send a text, you can do this.

  1. Nurses and health workers

  2. Teachers and trainers

  3. Assistants

  4. Anyone studying

  5. Small business owners

  6. Writers and journalists

  7. Recruiters and HR

  8. Lawyers and paralegals

  9. Marketing and sales

  10. Software engineers

  11. Managers

  12. Everyone!

The one thing everyone on that list has in common: learning this is no longer optional. In the World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025, 41% of employers expect to shrink their workforce where AI can do the work, and most plan to hire people with AI skills in their place. The job does not go to the AI. It goes to the person who can use it.

What makes this different

Most AI tips are made up. You will learn to test them.

Most AI courses, including some of the most taken in the world, hand you a list of magic phrases. A lot of those phrases do not survive testing.

This course teaches you to use AI the right way: test its answers, and check whether the new trick everyone is talking about actually works, before you rely on it. You will understand the system well enough to judge your own prompts and everyone else's. No more black box. You take control, and you get more productive than ever.

Save my seat

Free. No card. Cohort 1 starts Monday 14 September 2026.

FAQ

The things people ask before they save a seat.

Every answer is the honest one. Where the answer is no, it says no.

  1. Do I need to know how to code?

    No. Nobody writes a line of code in this course.

  2. How much does it cost?

    Nothing. The first 1,000 seats are free. There is no card to reserve a seat and no card afterwards. Later cohorts stay free too, with fewer seats each time.

  3. Do I need a paid AI subscription?

    No. Every session is built to be finished on the free tier of the apps you already have, and the AI model you install on day one is free too. No API keys, no credit card.

  4. Which AI apps does it use?

    The four big ones, ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Grok, plus a small open-weight AI model such as Gemma or Qwen, installed free on day one of the first course, with PocketPal AI on a phone or LM Studio on a computer, so you see what the big products add around a bare model. You meet all four and work hands-on with at least two, and the final comparison runs one task across a few of them and your own local model, scored on a sheet you wrote first. Free accounts are enough for all of it: one on day one, and two more free signups later in the course, on the days that need them.

  5. How much time does it take?

    The first course, Introduction to AI and LLMs, is four sessions of 90 minutes a week, which is six hours, plus Day 5 for the weekly quiz and catching up. Four weeks and 16 sessions in total: 24 hours of sessions.

  6. Are the sessions live, or do I go at my own pace?

    You run each 90-minute session yourself, and there is no lecture to sit through. What is fixed is the day. This is a cohort rather than a self-paced course, so everyone is on the same session on the same day, and Day 5 of each week is where the week is closed off.

  7. What happens if I fall behind or miss a week?

    Day 5 is the catch-up day and exists for exactly this. Miss two sessions in a week and you use Day 5 and the weekend, with no penalty and nothing recorded.

  8. Is the certificate accredited?

    No. We are not accredited and this is not a degree. The certificate names what you actually did: the sessions you finished.

  9. Is this a prompt engineering course?

    Yes, and it starts a step earlier than most. Prompt engineering is the craft of asking for something in a way that gets you a usable answer. Week one teaches how the machine works, so the asking is a decision rather than a guess. Week two starts the asking itself.

  10. What comes after this course?

    More short courses, later this year, on the same terms: free and four weeks, but with fewer open seats.

  11. When does it start, and what if I miss the date?

    Cohort 1 starts on Monday 14 September 2026. If you miss it, reserve a seat anyway. Later cohorts stay free, with fewer seats each time.

  12. Who runs it?

    Julien Barbier and Youssef Charif Hamidi. Julien co-founded Holberton School and was Chief Product Officer at ALX, where the programmes went from a few thousand learners to more than 1.6 million. Youssef is a full-stack engineer with certificates in software engineering and AI from ALX Africa, where he learned to code on one of Julien's programmes.

  13. Can my organisation run this for its people?

    Yes. Contact Julien at julien@cyberiadlabs.com.

Cohort 1 starts Monday 14 September 2026.

The first 1,000 seats are free. Later cohorts stay free too, with fewer seats each time.

Start: Monday 14 September 202620 days until Cohort 1 of Introduction to AI and LLMs starts

Built by the Holberton co-founder (1.6M+ learners at ALX).

Four 90-minute sessions a week, plus Day 5 for the weekly quiz and catching up.

The first 1,000 seats are free.20 days left

Save my seat

Save my seat

Cohort 1 of Introduction to AI and LLMs. Your email address is the only thing needed to hold a place.

Free. No card. Cohort 1 starts Monday 14 September 2026.