At ‘AI Coachella,’ Stanford Students Line Up to Learn From Silicon Valley Royalty | EUROtoday

As hundreds 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 just a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is considered one of Stanford’s buzziest choices this semester, and just like the music pageant, it includes 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 companies. The record of visitor lecturers reads like a Signal 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 House Senior Policy Advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, amongst others. It’s the fourth yr Midha and Abbott have taught some model of this class. Once registration went stay this yr, the category’s 500 seats shortly stuffed up, with dozens of scholars on the waitlist and hundreds 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 informed me the category was too full for journalists to come back in.

Part of Stanford’s attract has lengthy been entry to Silicon Valley elites. Its campus sits only a few miles from Sand Hill Road, residence 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 high brass and schooling in an excessive approach—which is exactly why some folks have taken difficulty 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 needs to be spending their time in “real” lessons, not attending a stay 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 classes with guest speaker lineups that read like AI coachella,” stated Jesse Mu, an Anthropic researcher, in a publish on X. “You’re basically paying $5k to listen to a live podcast series.”

“Everyone taking CS 153. Only 3 people in my Stanford functional analysis class today,” wrote Luke Heeney, a analysis fellow in economics at Stanford University, in one other publish. “Remember to eat your veggies.”

Midha has leaned into the mockery. He ordered 500 T-shirts that learn “I took CS 153 and all I got was AI coachella,” which he plans handy out to college students on Thursday. “The critics were unintentionally red teaming my system,” he tells me, framing the debacle within the infrastructure language of an engineer. “I was like, huh, AI Coachella? Is that a feature or a bug? That’s totally a feature. That’s product market fit.”

Midha and Abbott not too long ago launched a brand new enterprise agency, AMP, which goals to produce AI startups with each capital and computing capability. Midha disclosed in the beginning 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. But that entry is a part of the category’s enchantment.

So what precisely do Stanford college students find out about in AI Coachella? The class is basically 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 aren’t commoditizing, that means their worth just isn’t reducing 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.