Like thousands influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music FestivalA Silicon Valley program called “AI Coachella” was taking place a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford’s hottest offerings this semester, and like a musical, it features a star-studded lineup of celebrities—in this case, not pop artists, but Big Tech Executive directors.
The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, ex Andreessen Horowitz senior partner, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former VP of cloud services engineering. The list of invited speakers reads like a group chat of Waves that most VCs would pay to join: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic philosopher Amanda Askell, and White House Senior Policy Advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, among others. This is the fourth year Midha and Abbott have taught a version of this class. Once registration began this year, the 500 class seats quickly filled up, with many students on a waiting list and thousands more watching lectures posted on YouTube.
On Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz co-founder Ben Horowitz came to speak. I planned to attend, but at the last minute, Midha’s spokesperson told me the class was too full for journalists to enter.
Part of Stanford’s influence has long been access to Silicon Valley elites. Its campus is just a few miles from Sand Hill Road, home to major venture capital firms, and it’s not uncommon to see San Francisco startups like Cursor or Vercel recruiting from the school’s computer science clubs. CS 153 combines copper access with Silicon Valley higher education in an extreme way—which is exactly why some people have taken issue with it.
After CS 153 guest lecture series screenshot go virus on social networks this year, some critics said that students should spend their time in “real” classes, not attending a live podcast recording organized by VCs. Word on campus is that some Stanford professors are disgusted by what some see as a celebration of raw power.
“Protip for Stanford undergrads: beware of classes with guest speaker lineups that read like AI coachella,” Jesse Mu, an Anthropic researcher, said. post on X. “You’re basically paying $5k to listen to a live podcast series.”
“Everyone is taking CS 153. Only 3 people in my Stanford job analysis class today,” wrote Luke Heeney, a research fellow in economics at Stanford University, in another post. post. “Remember to eat your vegetables.”
Midha is leaning on mockery. He ordered 500 T-shirts that read “I took CS 153 and all I got was AI coachella,” which he plans to distribute to students on Thursday. “Critics were unwittingly conflating my system,” he tells me, framing the debate in the language of an infrastructure engineer. “I was like, huh, AI Coachella? Is that a feature or a bug? That’s absolutely a feature. That fits the product market.”
Midha and Abbott recently launched a new venture, AMP, which aims to supply AI startups with capital and computing power. Midha revealed at the beginning of the class that several of the guest lecturers are running companies he has invested in, including Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Sesame, and Periodic Labs. But that accessibility is part of the appeal of the class.
So what exactly do Stanford students learn at AI Coachella? The class covers frontier AI systems, which most undergraduate computer science courses only touch on. Midha used the first speech of the year to discuss the computing infrastructure that supports AI models. He said that AI chips are not traded, meaning that their price does not decrease over time. To prove his point, he shared internal charts that he compiled in AMP on Nvidia H100 increasing prices over the last 90 days.
