Cyberiad Labs and GDG Babcock partner to teach Nigerian students how AI works, and when not to trust it
Nigerians were the largest group in Cyberiad Labs’ first class, more than 450 of its 1,005 learners, and GDG Babcock is its first partner in Nigeria. The first 100 of GDG Babcock’s members start the course on 2 November.
RALEIGH, N.C., and ILISHAN-REMO, Nigeria, 21 October 2026. Cyberiad Labs and GDG Babcock today announced a partnership that gives GDG Babcock’s members free places in Cyberiad Labs’ classes. It starts with 100 places in the class that opens on Monday 2 November 2026. GDG Babcock will then get free places in every future class, and in every new course Cyberiad Labs launches. The course, Introduction to AI and LLMs, is online, part-time and four weeks long.
“Our course is for everyone, and that includes people who write code,” said Julien Barbier, co-founder of Cyberiad Labs. “AI now writes code that looks right in seconds, so the hard part is knowing when it is wrong, and that takes understanding how it works and where it fails. The checking habit the course builds is the one you need to review what Copilot writes. Two of the people on our first call were my former learners, and they told me there are more in the group and across the university. I’m proud that our first partnership in Nigeria started with them.”
Developers have made AI part of their day, and they trust it about as far as they can check it. Stack Overflow’s 2026 Developer Survey, published this month, drew more than 30,000 responses from 169 countries. Four in five respondents used AI for at least an hour a day, but 48% trust its output only when they can easily verify it. Just 6.6% would trust it with important work decisions.
GDG Babcock is the Google Developer Group on campus at Babcock University, in Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State. Students started it in 2022, and about 500 take part in its programmes each year, most of them Babcock students. It is open to students of every department, and to people from outside the university.
Babcock University opened in 1959 as the Adventist College of West Africa, with seven students. It became one of Nigeria’s first three private universities in 1999, and today it has more than 13,000 full-time students.
GDG Babcock’s members learn in four tracks: software development and engineering, data and AI, infrastructure and security, and design and management. They meet on campus for workshops, study jams, tech talks, hackathons and monthly meetups, and they build products for the campus, such as BabcockVotes, a voting platform they built and ran for the whole university. Over three days in April 2026, the first ORBIT, GDG Babcock’s flagship event, brought more than 300 students to a conference, took 70 of them to visit tech companies in Lagos, and drew more than 1,000 people to a career fair.
Cyberiad Labs teaches people to work with AI while keeping their own judgment and their own voice. Its first class opened on 14 September with 1,005 learners from 51 countries, 95% of them in Africa. The country’s National Artificial Intelligence Strategy, published in September 2025, aims to give AI-related skills to at least 70% of its young workforce, aged 16 to 35.
GDG Babcock’s places come on top of the public ones, which are full for every class until the end of 2026. This is Cyberiad Labs’ sixth education partnership, after the Mandela AI Hub Foundation, 2APA, Hyver Organization, Nguvu-TEACH and SomoTech Africa.
GDG Babcock’s members already build with AI. This year the chapter ran a Build with AI challenge in March and a buildathon in May, and its GDG Week closes each second semester with a week of daily, hands-on AI workshops. On 31 October, it co-hosts DevFest Abeokuta, on developers and builders in the agentic era.
They question it too. In April, an essay in RADAR, the chapter’s monthly publication, warned that AI is being trusted with decisions that matter before anyone fully understands how it works, and that people defer to it instead of thinking for themselves. Cyberiad Labs’ course is built to keep that from happening.
“We started ORBIT because most of our members couldn’t get to the big tech events in Lagos, so we brought the industry to them,” said Omobolanle Shaibu, organizer of GDG Babcock. “This partnership does the same for AI,” said Osisanya Oluwadayomisi, partnerships lead at GDG Babcock. “Our members will learn how it works, where it fails, and how to check it for free, and they can still join after they graduate.”
“I study computer science at Babcock, and I’m an ALX alum, so when I saw Julien launch Cyberiad Labs, I reached out,” said Favour Uzochukwu, vice president of GDG Babcock. “Our tracks take members from their first line of code to products people use, and AI is now part of that path. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well, and that includes working with AI. I want every member to understand the tools they build with, check what those tools produce, and know when not to trust them.”
Cyberiad Labs’ Introduction to AI and LLMs (large language models) teaches learners what AI is, how it works and where it fails. On the first day, every learner installs a small free AI model that runs on their own device, so they keep access to AI even when the internet drops. From the first week, they see that the system answering so confidently is a program predicting text, one piece at a time, and that it can be wrong. Then they look behind the chat window: the instructions the company writes before the user’s first message, the router that picks which model answers, the tools it calls, and the setting that makes the same question get a different answer each time. Throughout the course, they practise checking its answers, asking for its sources and verifying them, and deciding for themselves when to rely on it.
The partnership also includes a fireside chat with Julien Barbier for GDG Babcock’s members, on 27 October.
GDG Babcock’s members register through a link Cyberiad Labs sends them. Other non-profits and foundations that don’t charge their learners can ask for free places of their own at julien@cyberiadlabs.com.
About Cyberiad Labs
Cyberiad Labs teaches people to work with AI without handing it their thinking. Those skills help people keep a job or find one, and help organisations keep up as AI changes their work. It teaches learners directly, and works with schools, universities, companies, NGOs and governments.
Julien Barbier co-founded Holberton School, a software engineering school with no teachers, no lectures and no upfront tuition. It grew from one campus in San Francisco to 32 worldwide before it was acquired. He then led product and growth at ALX across its software engineering and applied AI programmes, where the number of learners went from a few thousand to more than 1.6 million. Before Holberton, he was the first head of marketing, growth and community at Docker.
Youssef Charif Hamidi is a full-stack engineer. He learned to code on Julien’s 12-month ALX software engineering programme. He finished it on an Android tablet, because cerebral palsy limits him to about two words a minute on a computer keyboard. Previously, he built MathVellum, a maths editor for people who cannot hold a pen.
Home: https://www.cyberiadlabs.com
About GDG Babcock
GDG Babcock (GDG on Campus Babcock University) is the student-run Google Developer Group on campus at Babcock University, in Ilishan-Remo, Ogun State, Nigeria. Founded in 2022, it teaches students of every department to build, through four tracks, workshops, study jams, hackathons and monthly meetups. Its programmes include ORBIT and GDG Week’s Build with AI workshops, and it builds products for the campus and its builders, including RADAR, Babcock 100 and BabcockVotes. GDG Babcock is an independent group: its activities and opinions are its own, not Google’s. https://www.gdgbabcock.com
Contact information
Julien Barbier, co-founder, Cyberiad Labs, julien@cyberiadlabs.com
Omobolanle Shaibu, organizer, GDG Babcock, gdgbabcock@gmail.com
Sources
- Stack Overflow, “Stack Overflow Developer Survey 2026” and its “AI” section.
- OECD.AI, “National Artificial Intelligence Strategy (NAIS)”, Nigeria.
- The Guardian Nigeria, Azeez Olorunlomeru, “Babcock marks 67 years of institutional journey, 27 as university”, 18 September 2026.
- Babcock University, “Our history”.
- RADAR, “Progress… But At What Cost?”, in “April- Tech, Events and Enlightenment!”, 30 April 2026.
- GDG Babcock, “The Team” and “Products”.
- Google Developer Groups, “GDG on Campus Babcock University”, events.