Cyberiad Labs Sign in Save my seat

All news

Press release 4 min read

His courses and technology reached 1.6 million learners. His next one teaches them to think for themselves with AI

"I think, therefore I am". If AI does the thinking, who are we?

RALEIGH, N.C., 14 September 2026. Cyberiad Labs launches today. It is a new initiative from Julien Barbier, co-founder of Holberton School and Chief Product Officer of ALX while it grew past 1.6 million learners, and Youssef Charif Hamidi, who learned to code on one of his programmes there. Cyberiad Labs' mission is to ensure people keep their own judgment and their own voice as they work with AI, and in the process learn how to use AI the right way, and find or keep their jobs.

Cyberiad Labs launches two days after Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, in "We Must Pace the Frontier", asked the industry to "slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models", warning that within six to twelve months a swarm of AI agents "could be capable of taking over the entire internet". OpenAI's Sam Altman and Elon Musk, whose xAI makes Grok, agreed the same day. And six days after more than 25 education ministers, at UNESCO in Paris on 8 September, adopted a statement saying that "learning is not served when AI substitutes for human relationships and human judgement".

"The headlines worry about the day the AI and the robots wake up and kill us all. I worry about the day before, when we have lost ourselves, one prompt at a time," said Julien Barbier. "I worry about a future where one model, treated like the one true voice, decides what we think, how we think it, and how we say it, because people have surrendered their voice and critical thinking to it."

With Cyberiad Labs courses, and from the very beginning, people see with their own eyes that the thing that sounds so sure, the thing people follow like a best friend or a god, is a text predictor, guessing its answer one "word" at a time, with a product wrapped around it. And that it can and will make mistakes.

The first course, Introduction to AI and LLMs, is free, online, part-time and four weeks long. Anyone can take it. The 1,000 seats of the first class, starting today, went in less than 24 hours to learners from 50 countries, and the second class, starting in November, is already full. Learners come from all walks of life: teachers, pharmacists, retailers, software engineers and even tennis instructors.

Cyberiad Labs has no model to sell and no chatbot to defend. It is independent and agnostic: its courses use ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok and small open models alike, and take no side between them. The only side they take is the learner's free will. The bet is the one Fei-Fei Li of Stanford made on PBS in May 2025: "if we teach responsible tool using, students will be super powered by AI..."

There is a more practical reason most people take the course though, and it is their job. In Microsoft and LinkedIn's Work Trend Index, 71% of business leaders said they would rather hire someone with less experience and AI skills than someone with more experience and none, and 66% said they would not hire someone without AI skills at all. PwC's 2025 AI Jobs Barometer puts the wage premium for jobs that ask for AI skills at 56%. "You are not going to lose your job to AI," Barbier wrote when he announced the course, "but you will lose it to someone who knows how to use AI better than you do."

As Saadia Zahidi, managing director of the World Economic Forum, put it in January: "the future of work is not fixed. How it unfolds for workers depends on opportunities for learning." Youssef Charif Hamidi knows which workers she means. "I learned to code with Julien at ALX for free, and the people I learned with don't have access to this kind of education. This is built for them," he said. "It matters that everyone, no matter where they live or who they are, has access to this. Our first step is 1,000,000 learners by 2030, and we’ll achieve this with partners: schools, companies, non-profits and governments."

One more seat, on top of the 1,000, is held for a reporter who wants to take the four weeks and check for themselves.

About Cyberiad Labs

Cyberiad Labs' mission is to ensure people keep their own judgment and their own voice as they work with AI, and in the process learn how to use AI the right way, and find or keep their jobs. It does this through free courses for individuals and programmes with partner organisations. Julien Barbier co-founded Holberton School in San Francisco in 2015, a school with no lectures and no upfront tuition, and ran it as CEO from one campus to 32; the African Leadership Group acquired it in July 2022. He was then Chief Product Officer of ALX as it grew from a few thousand learners to more than 1.6 million. Youssef Charif Hamidi, a full-stack engineer from Morocco, learned to code at ALX and co-founded RemoteOtter, a remote job platform. First milestone: 1,000,000 learners by 2030. https://cyberiadlabs.com

Why Cyberiad Labs exists: https://cyberiadlabs.com/mission.html

Contact

Julien Barbier, co-founder, julien@cyberiadlabs.com

Notes to editors