At ‘AI Coachella’, Stanford students line up to learn from Silicon Valley royalty

As thousands Influencers flocked to Southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella music festival, a Silicon Valley special dubbed “AI Coachella” that was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford’s busiest offerings this semester, and like the music festival, it features a star-studded lineup of celebrities — in this case, not pop artists, but CEOs of major tech companies.

The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, former general partner of Andreessen Horowitz, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former vice president of engineering for cloud services. The list of guest lecturers reads like a group chat on Signal that many venture capitalists might pay to join: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, AMD CEO Lisa Su, anthropologist Amanda Askel, and White House senior policy advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, among others. This is the fourth year that Madha and Abbott have taught some version of this class. Once registration began this year, the class’s 500 seats filled up quickly, with dozens of students on a waiting list and thousands more watching lectures posted on YouTube.

On Tuesday, Ben Horowitz, co-founder of Andreessen Horowitz, came to speak. I was planning to attend, but at the last minute, a Medha spokesperson told me that the class was too full for journalists to attend.

Part of Stanford’s appeal has long been access to Silicon Valley elites. Its campus is located just a few miles off Sand Hill Road, home to well-known 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 mixes access to Silicon Valley’s top brass with education in an extreme way — which is exactly why some people object to it.

After a screenshot of CS 153’s guest lecture set went viral on social media this year, some critics argued that students should be spending their time in “real” classrooms, not attending a live podcast recording hosted by a venture capitalist. What’s common on campus is that other Stanford professors bristled at what some see as a celebration of brute force.

“Advice for Stanford students: Beware of classes with rows of guest speakers reading like Coachella AI,” anthropologist Jesse Mo said in a post on X. “You’re basically paying $5,000 to listen to a live podcast series.”

“Everyone is taking CS 153. There are only 3 people in my functional analysis class at Stanford today,” Luke Heaney, a research fellow in economics at Stanford University, wrote in another post. “Remember to eat your vegetables.”

It stooped to sarcasm. He ordered 500 T-shirts that said “I took CS 153 and all I got was AI Coachella,” which he plans to distribute to students on Thursday. “The critics have inadvertently packaged my system,” he told me, depicting the disaster in the language of an engineer’s infrastructure. “I was like AI Coachella? Is this a feature or a bug? This is absolutely a feature. This is product-market fit.”

Midha and Abbott recently launched a new venture company, AMP, which aims to provide AI startups with capital and computing power. Medha revealed at the beginning of the course that many of the guest lecturers run companies he has 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 at AI Coachella? The class is largely about frontier AI systems, which many undergraduate computer science courses only touch on. Madha spent the first lecture of the year discussing the computing infrastructure that supports AI models. AI chips are not commoditized, meaning their price does not decrease over time, he said. To prove his point, he shared internal charts he compiled at AMP on the Nvidia H100’s price rise in the last 90 days.