Most undergraduate students wait until graduation and a fair amount of work experience before launching a startup. However, at the Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence (MBZUAI) upcoming undergraduate programme, students will pitch to real investors in their first year and are expected to build companies before they’ve even finished their degrees.  

“We don’t want students learning about entrepreneurship from someone who has never started a company,” said Hao Li, Professor of Computer Vision at MBZUAI. “You want the person who has sold his company for hundreds of millions of dollars to teach you how to negotiate with investors, keep a team together, and build something real.” With AI reshaping the job market, MBZUAI is rethinking what education should be - combining AI, business, ethics, and real-world skills from day one, he added.

The faculty includes an impressive list of serial entrepreneurs, AI pioneers, and industry leaders. Among them is Alexander Cannon, who sold his company — Vision Labs — for no less than $100 million. He will teach students how to navigate the startup world from day one. 

Joining Cannon is Hanan Al Darmaki, a leading expert in AI for Arabic dialects and Assistant Professor of Natural Language Processing; Elizabeth Churchill, former Google UX Director and Department Chair and Professor of Human-Computer Interaction, who will train students in user experience design; and Alham Fikri Aji, a coding Olympiad mentor who has trained students to win international hackathons.

Professor Li, the mind behind iPhone’s Animoji and the digital resurrection of Paul Walker in Furious 7, will continue to bring his expertise in AI for visual effects, as he has been working with postgraduate students on several innovations at the MBZUAI. Among MBZUAI’s flagship projects is JAIS, one of the most powerful Arabic-language large language models (LLMs). Developed in just one year, JAIS is an open-source, multilingual AI model, uniquely built within a university setting rather than a corporate lab, allowing greater academic collaboration and transparency.

The MBZUAI metaverse centre is also pioneering immersive telepresence and next-generation digital avatars, with technology showcased alongside industry leaders like Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg at SIGGRAPH. “Last year, we presented [our research] on the same stage as Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg at SIGGRAPH, a state-of-the-art technology where people can generate realistic avatars from a photo,” said Li. This innovation opens new possibilities for virtual interactions, pushing the boundaries of AI-driven digital presence.

Additionally, the university has been using generative AI for drug discovery, with faculty members launching a startup to accelerate the development of new medicines. “There’s a few faculties that have spun off a new startup company,” Li explained. The research focuses on building foundational models that understand biology at various scales, from proteins to human tissues. “How can we basically use AI to invent new drugs for diseases faster than people could do it in real life?” While still in its early stages, this work has the potential to revolutionise how new treatments are discovered and developed.

“In most universities, you learn theory first and maybe start applying it later,” said Li. “Here, from day one, (undergrad) students will take AI, business, and entrepreneurship together. One of their first classes is entrepreneurship, where they’ll be thrown into the deep end — building companies, learning what goes wrong, and embracing risk-taking.”

The programme is structured like Y Combinator’s elite startup accelerator, blending AI engineering with real-world business strategy. Students will be trained by leaders from top Silicon Valley companies and will not be taught coding by traditional professors but by competitive programmers who have excelled in global competitions.

MBZUAI is attracting some of the brightest young minds in AI, he said. “We’ve seen applicants as young as 15 who have already started their own companies or led open-source AI projects. One student had a team of five working on an AI project with no funding—just pure ambition and charisma.” Applications for the Fall 2025 intake are already pouring in from around the world. The first cohort will be highly selective, capped at 100 students, with MBZUAI offering full scholarships for both the AI Engineering and AI in Business tracks. “Our goal is to bring together the next generation of AI pioneers — ambitious, entrepreneurial students who look up to Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, who want to change the world, not just follow trends.”

With AI automating more jobs and even writing code, Li and his colleagues have been questioning if there is a need for traditional education; MBZUAI’s answer is yes, but different. “We sat down with world experts to rethink what education should be. Do students really need to learn compilers or discrete mathematics in depth? Or do they need to know how to build AI that matters?” Therefore, MBZUAI’s bachelor’s degree curriculum balances AI, business, ethics, and philosophy to prepare students for a world where AI works alongside humans. Unlike other AI programmes, MBZUAI’s includes a final-year co-op experience, where students will work as employees — or employers — at top Silicon Valley companies.

MBZUAI’s undergraduate programme will also introduce a foundational blockchain course, giving students insights into areas like cryptocurrency, smart contracts, and decentralised applications. While initially an elective at the undergraduate level, the university is exploring opportunities to expand this field into graduate-level specialisations in the future. According to Li, interest in MBZUAI’s new undergraduate programme has surged since its announcement, with the university expecting a highly selective first cohort of around 100 students this fall. 

With more than 350 students currently enrolled in its postgraduate programmes – Master’s and PhD, over 20 per cent of these students came from the world’s top 100 undergraduate institutions, and the student body spans more than 45 countries, including North America, Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, the Middle East and North Africa, the Caribbean, East and South Asia, and Sub-Saharan Africa. The student body incudes 63 Emirati students and 111 female students, taught by more 80 professors, including over 40 from the world’s top 100 AI institutions.