Free AI courses. Honestly mapped.
Moonlabs is the operator-led AI Academy in Derby. We run three live companies — Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk — and we teach twelve students per cohort to ship a real AI product, sell it to a real customer, and raise on it. Three pillars: Coding, Commercials, Investment. Twelve weeks. £6,000.
Moonlabs is what we are. Two operators — James Freestone and Louis O’Connell-Bristow — who run Homemove, home.co.uk and homedata.co.uk. We started by working through fast.ai, the Anthropic and OpenAI docs, and Karpathy on YouTube ourselves — like everyone else who actually ships AI. The honest free-vs-paid map on this page is the one we use when friends ask.
The Academy is what we do. A twelve-week, in-person, twelve-student cohort in Derby. You build a real AI product. You sign a paid pilot on it. You write a deck and a financial model. You leave with a deployed system, a paying customer reference and a live investor pipeline. Coding, Commercials, Investment — the three pillars taught in equal weight every week.
Why this page exists. A lot of the best AI training in the world is genuinely free — fast.ai, Anthropic and OpenAI docs, Hugging Face, YC Startup School, Stanford CS25, jointakeoff trials, Karpathy on YouTube. There is no good reason to pay anyone before you have used at least three of these honestly. Free hits a clear ceiling, though — the asynchronous courses produce asynchronous students, and the things that make AI engineers actually ship (operator in the room, paid pilots, network, real fundraising arc) are structurally not on a free shelf. Use the free resources first; come back when they hit the ceiling.
Coding · free first, paid when free hits the ceiling
fast.ai for the foundations. Anthropic and OpenAI docs for the API. Hugging Face for the model side. Karpathy on YouTube for the intuitions. Do these first. When you hit the “I can describe AI but cannot ship” wall, the Academy teaches the production stack — Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, retrieval, agents, evals, deploy — on a real product. A deployed AI product by week twelve.
Commercials · the half no free course teaches
Free courses never run a real discovery call. Free courses never let you watch your pricing land in front of a buyer. Free courses never make you write a one-page pilot agreement and chase the invoice. A paid pilot by week six — the milestone that decides whether the next decade of your career exists.
Investment · the network free cannot scale
Free courses cannot give you fifty curated UK investors (Plural, Local Globe, Concrete VC, Pi Labs, EF, Forward Partners, Notion Capital, Octopus, Backed VC, Hoxton). Free courses cannot make warm introductions. Free courses cannot put you in a room of twelve operators all on the same arc. A live investor pipeline by demo day — the part of the work that has no free equivalent.
Common questions.
What is the single best free starting point?
fast.ai. It has been free for years, it is genuinely well-taught, and it gets you to working code faster than any other free course we know. Andrej Karpathy’s YouTube series is the strongest free conceptual foundation. Start there.
Is jointakeoff worth paying for, or just the free part?
jointakeoff is one of the strongest paid online options if asynchronous is the right shape for you. The free / trial content is a fair sample. Our comparison page covers when jointakeoff is the right answer instead of us.
Why is the Moonlabs Academy not free?
Because twelve weeks of two operators in a room with twelve students is a fundamentally different cost structure to a recorded course that scales infinitely. Tuition is £6,000. Whether that pays back is covered honestly here.
Are any free AI bootcamps actually any good?
Some structured free programmes (Founders & Coders, occasional Code First Girls cohorts) are genuinely good for the on-ramp. Free in-person AI-specific bootcamps mostly do not exist at the level we are comparing against; that is in part because the operator-led shape does not scale free.
What about free university AI MOOCs?
Stanford CS229, CS25, MIT 6.S191 on YouTube — all serious. They will teach you the theory deeply. They will not teach you to ship a product, write a pitch deck, or close a paid pilot. Different artefacts.
More Academy entry points.
The Academy is one course with many doors. Each of these pages is a different entry point into the same twelve weeks.
Build it. Sell it. Raise on it. In twelve weeks.
Tell us what free resources you have worked through and where you are stuck. James and Louis read every application personally and reply inside the week.
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