Stanford Students Gather at ‘AI Coachella’ to Gain Insights from Silicon Valley Icons

As thousands of influencers flocked to southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a unique program dubbed “AI Coachella” was emerging a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of the most talked-about offerings at Stanford this semester, starring not pop artists, but Big Tech CEOs.

Co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner, and Michael Abbott, the former VP of engineering for cloud services at Apple, the course features a guest lecturer roster that reads like a must-have group chat for VCs: OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia’s CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft’s CEO Satya Nadella, AMD’s CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic philosopher Amanda Askell, and White House Senior Policy Advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, to name a few. This marks the fourth year that Midha and Abbott have led variations of this class. Once registration opened, all 500 seats filled up rapidly, with many students left on the waitlist and thousands more tuning into the lectures on YouTube.

On Tuesday, Ben Horowitz, cofounder of Andreessen Horowitz, spoke to the class. I had intended to attend, but a spokesperson for Midha informed me last minute that the class was too packed for journalists.

Stanford’s appeal has long been tied to its proximity to Silicon Valley elites. The campus is located just a few miles from Sand Hill Road, the headquarters of many prominent venture capital firms, and it’s common for San Francisco startups like Cursor or Vercel to recruit from the university’s computer science clubs. CS 153 offers a unique blend of access to Silicon Valley’s influential leaders and cutting-edge education, which has sparked some controversy.

After a screenshot showcasing CS 153’s lineup of guest lecturers went viral on social media this year, some critics suggested that students should concentrate on “real” classes rather than participate in what they perceived as a live podcast hosted by VCs. Rumors indicate that some Stanford professors have expressed discomfort with what they consider a glorification of sheer power.

“Protip for Stanford undergrads: beware the classes with guest speaker lineups that read like AI coachella,” Jesse Mu, an Anthropic researcher, remarked on X. “You’re essentially paying $5k to listen to a live podcast series.”

“Everyone taking CS 153. Only 3 people in my Stanford functional analysis class today,” shared Luke Heeney, a research fellow in economics at Stanford University, in another post. “Don’t forget to eat your veggies.”

Midha has embraced the satire surrounding the class. He ordered 500 T-shirts stating “I took CS 153 and all I got was AI coachella,” which he plans to distribute to students on Thursday. “The critics were unintentionally red teaming my system,” he shared, framing the controversy in the terms of an engineer. “I thought, huh, AI Coachella? Is that a feature or a bug? That’s definitely a feature. That’s product market fit.”

Midha and Abbott have also recently launched a new venture firm, AMP, aimed at providing AI startups with both funding and computing resources. Midha revealed at the semester’s start that several of the guest lecturers operate companies he has invested in, including Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Sesame, and Periodic Labs. This access is a significant part of the class’s allure.

So, what precisely do Stanford students explore in AI Coachella? The course primarily focuses on frontier AI systems, a topic many undergraduate computer science classes only skim. During the first lecture of the semester, Midha discussed the computing infrastructure underpinning AI models, arguing that AI chips are not becoming commoditized, meaning their prices are not declining over time. He illustrated his point with internal charts he aggregated at AMP showing that Nvidia H100 prices have increased over the past 90 days.