At 'AI Coachella,' Stanford Students Line Up to Learn From Silicon Valley Royalty

As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a very Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford’s buzziest offerings this semester, and like the music festival, it features a star-studded lineup of celebrities—in this case, not pop artists, but Big Tech CEOs.

The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former VP of engineering for cloud services. The list of guest lecturers reads like a Signal group chat many 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. It’s the fourth year Midha and Abbott have taught some version of this class. Once registration went live this year, the class’s 500 seats quickly filled up, with dozens of students on the waitlist and thousands more watching the lectures posted on YouTube.

On Tuesday, Andreessen Horowitz cofounder Ben Horowitz came to speak. I planned to attend, but at the last minute, a spokesperson for Midha told me the class was too full for journalists to come in.

Part of Stanford’s allure has long been access to Silicon Valley elites. Its campus sits just a few miles from Sand Hill Road, home to storied 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 blends access to Silicon Valley’s top brass and education in an extreme way—which is precisely why some people have taken issue with it.

After a screenshot of CS 153’s guest lecture lineup went viral on social media this year, some critics argued that students should be spending their time in “real” classes, not attending a live podcast recording hosted by VCs. The word on campus is that other Stanford professors have chafed at what some see as a celebration of raw power.

“Protip for Stanford undergrads: beware the classes with guest speaker lineups that read like AI coachella,” said Jesse Mu, an Anthropic researcher, in a post 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 research fellow in economics at Stanford University, in another post. “Remember to eat your veggies.”

Midha has leaned into the mockery. He ordered 500 T-shirts that read “I took CS 153 and all I got was AI coachella,” which he plans to hand out to students on Thursday. “The critics were unintentionally red teaming my system,” he tells me, framing the debacle in 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 recently launched a new venture firm, AMP, which aims to supply AI startups with both capital and computing capacity. Midha disclosed at the beginning of the class that several guest lecturers run companies that he’s invested in, including Black Forest Labs, Mistral, Sesame, and Periodic Labs. But that access is part of the class’s appeal.

So what exactly do Stanford students learn about in AI Coachella? The class is largely about frontier AI systems, which many undergraduate computer science courses only touch on. Midha spent the first lecture of the year discussing the computing infrastructure that supports AI models. He argued that AI chips are not commoditizing, meaning their price is not decreasing over time. To prove his point, he shared internal charts he’d aggregated at AMP on Nvidia H100 prices increasing in the last 90 days.