As 1000’s of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a really Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking form a couple of hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The category, CS 153, is certainly one of Stanford’s buzziest choices this semester, and just like the music pageant, it contains a star-studded lineup of celebrities—on this case, not pop artists, however Big Tech CEOs.
The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz normal accomplice, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former VP of engineering for cloud providers. The listing of visitor lecturers reads like a Sign group chat many VCs would pay to hitch: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic thinker Amanda Askell, and White Home Senior Coverage Advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, amongst others. It’s the fourth yr Midha and Abbott have taught some model of this class. As soon as registration went reside this yr, the category’s 500 seats shortly stuffed up, with dozens of scholars on the waitlist and 1000’s extra watching the lectures posted on YouTube.
On Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz got here to talk. I deliberate to attend, however on the final minute, a spokesperson for Midha instructed me the category was too full for journalists to return in.
A part of Stanford’s attract has lengthy been entry to Silicon Valley elites. Its campus sits only a few miles from Sand Hill Street, dwelling to storied enterprise capital corporations, and it’s not unusual to see San Francisco startups like Cursor or Vercel recruiting from the college’s pc science golf equipment. CS 153 blends entry to Silicon Valley’s prime brass and training in an excessive means—which is exactly why some individuals have taken problem with it.
After a screenshot of CS 153’s visitor lecture lineup went viral on social media this yr, some critics argued that college students must be spending their time in “actual” lessons, not attending a reside podcast recording hosted by VCs. The phrase on campus is that different Stanford professors have chafed at what some see as a celebration of uncooked energy.
“Protip for Stanford undergrads: beware the lessons with visitor speaker lineups that learn like AI coachella,” mentioned Jesse Mu, an Anthropic researcher, in a post on X. “You’re mainly paying $5k to hearken to a reside podcast collection.”
“Everybody taking CS 153. Solely 3 individuals in my Stanford purposeful evaluation class at the moment,” wrote Luke Heeney, a analysis fellow in economics at Stanford College, in one other post. “Keep in mind to eat your veggies.”
Midha has leaned into the mockery. He ordered 500 T-shirts that learn “I took CS 153 and all I received was AI coachella,” which he plans at hand out to college students on Thursday. “The critics had been unintentionally pink teaming my system,” he tells me, framing the debacle within the infrastructure language of an engineer. “I used to be like, huh, AI Coachella? Is {that a} function or a bug? That is completely a function. That is product market match.”
Midha and Abbott just lately launched a brand new enterprise agency, AMP, which goals to produce AI startups with each capital and computing capability. Midha disclosed at first of the category that a number of visitor lecturers run corporations that he’s invested in, together with Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Sesame, and Periodic Labs. However that entry is a part of the category’s enchantment.
So what precisely do Stanford college students study in AI Coachella? The category is essentially about frontier AI techniques, which many undergraduate pc science programs solely contact on. Midha spent the primary lecture of the yr discussing the computing infrastructure that helps AI fashions. He argued that AI chips will not be commoditizing, which means their value is just not reducing over time. To show his level, he shared inside charts he’d aggregated at AMP on Nvidia H100 costs growing within the final 90 days.
