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 host