How to Accelerate Learning with 'AI Schools'

Summary

• Liemandt says Alpha delivers twice the learning in two academic hours a day. His broader claim is that learning science and LLMs enable instruction “ten times faster,” freeing afternoons for life skills. Alpha has reached 50 campuses, and he argues its operating model improves with scale: “We get better as we get bigger.”
• Alpha treats motivation and measurable life skills as core product features. Liemandt reports that 50% of students prefer school to vacation and argues that “the key to your child’s happiness is high standards.” Third graders practice teamwork in escape rooms, moving from less than 20% uplifting language toward an 85% passing threshold; he says better teamwork makes them three times faster.
• The university opportunity is to organize learning around consequential work. Among more than 70 interns from MIT, Stanford and UT, Liemandt says only one expected university to prepare them for the world after graduation. The interns feared AI would eliminate the first- and second-year jobs they expected, then worked 80-hour weeks researching and building an educational language model—combining academic study with something they wanted people to use.
• Education adoption depends on local proof and committed founding families. Alpha’s New York campus opened with roughly 10–12 students after information sessions struggled to convert interest; Liemandt says it is now full at 150. His approach is “magnet marketing”: attract families who want the model and can tolerate early problems, then let visible student outcomes expand demand.
• The speakers expect human judgment and agency to become more valuable as AI commoditizes intelligence. Biyani says employers emphasize “people skills, maturity, and systems thinking,” developed through building, rejection and responsibility. Biyani’s academy’s one-year format also makes experimentation easier to reverse, although Liemandt’s claim that there is “no downside” is his assessment of that risk.
• Liemandt expects students to become major suppliers of learning software within two years. AI accelerates acquiring expertise and building products; he cites a student-built AP curriculum whose participants all scored 5. Biyani’s advice is to choose an interesting field and become AI native, approaching the future “on offense” rather than searching for a supposedly protected profession.
• Founders School puts a financial guarantee behind entrepreneurship education. Liemandt promises students will build a business earning $1 million in profit during high school or receive all tuition back. The specialized school opened in August and is only a couple of months into operation; his expectation that some students will reach $1 million in their first year is a forecast, not a reported result.

Deep dive

1. Faster instruction changes the entire school product

• Liemandt’s starting claim is that cognitive science, learning science and LLMs can make instruction “ten times faster.” Alpha’s operating promise is “twice as much in two hours a day” versus six classroom hours plus homework. Compounding that advantage, he argues, eventually takes children to the top 1%, “no matter where you start, given time.” He also calls Alpha the best academic-performing school on standardized tests.
• The first commitment is that children love attending. Liemandt reports that “ninety-some percent” say “I love school,” 50% prefer it to vacation, and one campus reaches 65%. Shortening academics does not shorten the school day: parents still need six or seven hours, and children want to stay.
• Afternoons become a curriculum of leadership, teamwork, entrepreneurship, financial literacy, relationships, storytelling, public speaking, grit and hard work. Students undertake challenging group projects with adults guiding them. His question for every school and university: if traditional instruction becomes ten times faster, “what do you do with the rest of the day?”
• Since becoming principal four years ago, Liemandt has approached Alpha as a product requiring understandable packaging and repeatable delivery. He spent his first three years working on scaling quality. Alpha added 12 campuses last year and is now at 50; he says test scores, satisfaction, student happiness and workshops improve together. “We get better as we get bigger.”

2. Motivation comes from difficult work with visible progress

• Gagan Biyani asks what makes children enjoy Alpha and how motivation changes outcomes. Liemandt warns that putting its learning engine into an unchanged school day means “it’ll fail.” The prerequisite is redesigning the day around children’s enthusiasm: are you willing to redesign school so kids love it more than vacation? That means challenge: “The key to your child’s happiness is high standards.” Children want to accomplish difficult things with friends.
• Teamwork becomes something observable. Alpha microphones third graders in escape rooms, then uses AI to analyze their language. Initially, less than 20% is uplifting; much consists of fighting and insisting on individual ideas. An eight-week workshop requires reaching 85% team-oriented behavior to pass. Students also see themselves finishing escape rooms three times faster when they cooperate.
• Liemandt contrasts this with conventional group projects, where one child works and everyone else coasts: “You learn like the anti-pattern.” Fourth and fifth graders must subsequently pass the Wharton MBA teamwork challenge, which he says 50% of MBAs fail. Life skills carry assessment requirements comparable to physics or mathematics.
• Academically, personalization repairs the failure cycle of a time-based classroom. An eighth grader missing a fifth-grade concept receives that lesson without being trapped by age expectations. Alpha targets 80–85% correct answers: 100% suggests material is too easy; excessive difficulty drives disengagement. Scaffolding or faster progression keeps work appropriately demanding. “We engineer wins for the kids in the academics.”

3. University needs to connect serious study with building

• Biyani draws inspiration from Alpha for the Horowitz and Dreesen Academy, where Liemandt is an investor and adviser. He wants to engineer stronger networks, agency and positive-sum behavior, but stresses that K–8, high school and college require different designs: “You can’t just copy everything over.” He argues university leaders spend 90% of their time attending to adults rather than students.
• Liemandt recounts hosting more than 70 interns from MIT, Stanford and UT. Asked whether university was preparing them for the world after graduation, only one raised a hand. Others feared AI would eliminate the first- and second-year jobs they expected. Their response was an ambitious project: research and build an educational small language model that could run on a device and be freely available worldwide.
• Those interns worked 80-hour weeks, including substantial research into learning science and model development. Biyani notes they were studying during those hours and guesses Joe assigned no textbooks; Liemandt says they researched learning science and the Brainlift while building the LLM. Biyani frames learning as “ninety percent motivation,” a point Liemandt affirms, and argues that useful products, revenue and employment can motivate 18-year-olds.
• Alpha’s first high-school graduates, three years ago, returned from university with 4.0s but called introductory lectures “a complete waste of time”; five wrote newspaper editorials criticizing them. They valued seminars, clubs and activities. University is “a bundle of products,” Liemandt says. Biyani’s counterpoint: much of the attractive bundle is student-created, while formal academics consume roughly half the time for students who attend.

4. Parents must choose a future they have not experienced

• Liemandt describes a split among parents: some still want a straight path from kindergarten to the Ivy League; an equal number, “maybe even more,” including Stanford and Harvard alumni, explicitly want another route. Younger families look 12 years ahead. Parents of 11th and 12th graders are harder to move: “I’ve been on this route, and I’m at the five-yard line.”
• His historical analogy is 1910: he says 90% of Americans had an eighth-grade education and more than 30% farmed. Liemandt says the Case tractor ads “literally look[] like an Anthropic ad”: “It does the work of 50 programmers. It does the work of 50 farmhands.” People saw the inherited employment path disappearing. His key detail is that 130,000 towns voted to raise taxes for high schools whose curriculum parents had never experienced. “They knew they had to do something different than their background.”
• Erik Torenberg raises the objection of a parent who sees an Ivy League school as safer than a new institution. Liemandt’s answer starts with adoption curves: “You don’t need everybody.” He acknowledges his own hesitation. Despite founding a company in a garage, he thought Alpha’s unconventional premises looked unsuitable for a school; moving his daughters from Catholic school took him two years.
• Interest alone did not produce enrollment. As Alpha was opening 12 campuses, information sessions could attract more than 1,000 people without yielding 25 students. New York opened with approximately 10–12; Liemandt says it is now full at 150. His expectation for the academy is similar: survive the first year, demonstrate students thriving, and make those outcomes the comparison parents use.

5. Founding families are part of the operating model

• Gagan Biyani describes early adoption as “positive self-selection”: students and parents willing to act on their convictions become part of the value of the community. He says early applicants are courageous and that they can be surrounded by brilliant, committed people. Liemandt agrees, but emphasizes the practical reason to select for commitment: “There will be hiccups.” Founding families who want the product become an important institutional asset.
• Liemandt calls his approach “magnet marketing”: attract the right families and repel unsuitable ones. Parents fundamentally opposed to AI or screen time are told they should not enroll. A clear product definition helps assemble a coherent community. Biyani takes the corresponding admissions lesson: be strict about who gets in rather than optimizing class size.
• Biyani presents the academy’s one-year format as a reversible detour: students can return to college. Liemandt goes further, saying “there’s no downside” and that even an unsuccessful experience could be enormously educational. His advice when a student strongly wants to attend is to let them try; Torenberg raises resentment as a risk of blocking that choice, and Liemandt calls that route “much riskier.”

6. Agency can reveal effort that grades fail to capture

• Liemandt supplies his own counterexample to equating disengagement with laziness. He skipped school, did enough to enter Stanford, then dropped out; his father’s reported reaction was “My son’s a moron.” After seeing him work 100-hour weeks building his company, his father changed his mind two years later: “This was the greatest thing ever.” Doing something he wanted transformed his effort.
• Torenberg observes the reverse problem: straight-A students can struggle when external structure disappears. Biyani says employers’ main concerns are “people skills, maturity, and systems thinking,” developed by building complex systems, handling rejection and organizing work oneself. Liemandt links that requirement to “AI commoditizing intelligence”: leadership, teamwork, ownership and receiving feedback require practice through projects. Those capabilities should belong in the curriculum, rather than depend on optional clubs.

7. AI-native students can acquire expertise and build with it

• Asked by Torenberg how an 18-year-old should design an education, Liemandt separates “cognitive onload” from building. AI can fill students’ heads with knowledge ten times faster, he argues, making domain expertise more accessible. He points to high-school students rebuilding the TimeBack software stack he wrote and becoming knowledgeable about learning science, and discusses acquiring master’s-equivalent knowledge in a year.
• The second capability is applying that knowledge through AI-assisted building. His summer interns researched because they needed to create something. Alpha students, he says, approach AI with confidence: “You adults are cooked,” and “We have superpowers.” He “absolutely” expects that in two years most learning software will be written by students, with peers supplying more engaging experiences.
• His example is Austin, who built an AP curriculum whose participating students all scored 5. A world-history offering combined a geography-guessing game, historical events, S-tier rankings and a snarky AI. Liemandt admits he does not really understand all the terminology, but students engaged enthusiastically. “Me and the old adult team are never gonna be able to build that.”
• Biyani rejects choosing a field primarily for future protection: “We want you to be on offense.” He has faith that AI-native mathematicians and coders will create possibilities their predecessors could not. His own commitment to education survived what both call a historically terrible market. Liemandt connects that stance to students reading The Rational Optimist: educators should develop people “optimistically capable with AI.”

8. Founders School makes entrepreneurship a teachable progression

• Liemandt believes AI will shrink large Fortune 500 companies while producing an explosion of entrepreneurship. Alpha therefore starts financial education in kindergarten, using its “Alphas” currency to teach earning, saving, spending, investing and donating. Entrepreneurship is not “a bolt of lightning”: it is a set of teachable skills, with Founders School providing a specialized high-school path for students who want to build businesses.
• The promise is explicit: students will start a business earning $1 million in profit while in high school, or receive all tuition back. Liemandt says previous Alpha High students have built businesses over the last four years, supplying examples behind his confidence. The specialized school itself opened in August, however, and is only a couple of months into its operation.
• Students progress through earning $100, $1,000, $10,000, $100,000 and $1 million, learning skills at each stage. Liemandt says some are “speed running it,” leading him to expect $1 million in their first year: “I’m outta a curriculum.” That is his forecast from early progress. Students’ response, he says, is to plan a larger business afterward.

9. Exposure and feedback raise students’ ambitions

• Liemandt remembers Stanford’s value in meeting accomplished people and realizing they were “a normal human.” That made comparable achievements feel accessible. He wants high-school students to have those relationships, just as the academy intends for its students. Gagan Biyani connects that goal to a formulation he tentatively attributes to Tyler Cowen: a teacher’s number-one job is to “raise a student’s ambition for themselves.” Biyani says Alpha tries to live that all day.
• One 14-year-old cold-called Jensen, who returned the call and allowed a 90-second pitch. Liemandt paraphrases the feedback: the student had spent the opportunity asking qualification questions that research or other employees could have answered—“you just used your bullet with me.” The verdict praised initiative but gave an F for preparation. Liemandt calls it the best learning lesson of that student’s life.
• Real-world exposure also includes Alpha’s World School: a year of service in Africa, with students signing, “I realize this will be the hardest year of my life.” Biyani says the academy has allocated $5,000 per student for travel. Students choose its use; his personal hope is that many travel alone to countries below $20,000 GDP per capita, gaining perspective useful in life and business.