As 1000’s of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Competition, a really Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking form a number of hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The category, CS 153, is considered one of Stanford’s buzziest choices this semester, and just like the music pageant, it incorporates a star-studded lineup of celebrities—on this case, not pop artists, however Large Tech CEOs.
The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz common accomplice, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former VP of engineering for cloud companies. The checklist of visitor lecturers reads like a Sign group chat many VCs would pay to affix: 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 dwell this yr, the category’s 500 seats rapidly crammed 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 come back in.
A part of Stanford’s attract has lengthy been entry to Silicon Valley elites. Its campus sits just some miles from Sand Hill Highway, house to storied enterprise capital companies, and it’s not unusual to see San Francisco startups like Cursor or Vercel recruiting from the varsity’s pc science golf equipment. CS 153 blends entry to Silicon Valley’s prime brass and schooling in an excessive approach—which is exactly why some individuals have taken challenge 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 dwell 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,” stated Jesse Mu, an Anthropic researcher, in a post on X. “You’re principally paying $5k to hearken to a dwell podcast sequence.”
“Everybody taking CS 153. Solely 3 individuals in my Stanford practical 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 obtained was AI coachella,” which he plans at hand out to college students on Thursday. “The critics have been unintentionally crimson 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 provide AI startups with each capital and computing capability. Midha disclosed initially of the category that a number of visitor lecturers run firms 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 find out about in AI Coachella? The category is essentially about frontier AI methods, 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 should not commoditizing, that means their value just isn’t lowering over time. To show his level, he shared inside charts he’d aggregated at AMP on Nvidia H100 costs rising within the final 90 days.
