AI News

Alpha School is opening a campus in Chicago this fall. No teachers. Students do their core subjects — math, science, reading — through AI software in about two hours a day, then spend the rest of the time with human "guides" doing workshops in public speaking, coding, outdoor ed. Tuition is $55K a year. They're already running 22 campuses in other states with over 1,000 students, and they're expanding to 35+ locations. Whether this specific model works long-term or not, it tells you something about where education is headed and what the next generation of workers is going to expect when they show up to your company.

Zuckerberg is reportedly building a personal AI agent to help him do his job as CEO — pulling up information fast without having to go through layers of people and reports, analyzing data, streamlining decisions. Meta employees are already using internal tools along the same lines: one called "Second Brain" that finds and organizes documents, and another called "My Claw" — a personalized AI agent that can actually talk to other agents. Zuckerberg's quote on where this is going: "We're elevating individual contributors and flattening teams." The goal is to use AI to collapse Meta's org structure and move faster. If the CEO of a $1.5 trillion company is using AI to skip management layers, that's a signal worth paying attention to.

Anthropic — the company that builds Claude — launched something called Anthropic Academy. It's 13+ free courses, self-paced, with certificates when you finish. There's a track for people who just want to get better at using AI day to day (no technical skills needed), one for developers who want to build with the API, and one for enterprise cloud stuff. The non-technical track is where most people should start. You don't need a paid account. You sign up with an email and go. If you've been meaning to actually learn this stuff instead of just poking around, this is the best free option out there right now.