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.

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.”

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. "The critics were unintentionally red teaming my system," he says, 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."

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.

“I kind of wanted to give the kids a cheat code. I have so much inside access and information,” says Midha, who is a Stanford alumnus himself. “I was like, okay, this is obvious to me. I should just give the students a chance to learn, instead of the VCs hoarding all the knowledge.”

Students in CS 153 say they are getting value out of the class. Mahi Jariwala, a sophomore, said it's been meaningful to sit in the room with successful investors and entrepreneurs and ask them questions. Darrow Hartman, a junior, says CS 153 gives him a high-level view of the startup world and has helped him find like-minded peers.

To my surprise, Midha also wants to teach students about navigating life in the AI boom. He told students about the importance of investing in personal relationships, not just work. Midha says he’s been shocked by how many high-profile entrepreneurs have agreed to visit CS 153. He thinks they’re doing it for the same reason he is: working in Silicon Valley can be draining, and speaking to a room full of bright-eyed Stanford students can remind them why they started.

While AI Coachella embodies the current moment in Silicon Valley, its appeal to students is unquestionable. In an era where AI tools can help people learn, access might be Stanford’s best selling point.