As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for Coachella, 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 features a star-studded lineup of Big Tech CEOs, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, and Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella.

Part of Stanford’s allure has long been access to Silicon Valley elites. CS 153 blends this access with education in an extreme way—so much so that some critics have argued that students should be spending their time in “real” classes rather than attending a live podcast recording hosted by venture capitalists.

The class is largely about frontier AI systems, and 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.

Both students I spoke to in CS 153 said 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—two weeks ago, she asked Black Forest Labs cofounder Andreas Blattmann how the company chooses partners, and why it recently turned down a partnership deal with xAI (he said BFL applies its safety guardrails evenly for everyone, and that sometimes results in losing out on important partners). 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.

Midha also wants to teach students about navigating life in the AI boom. In the first few minutes of his opening lecture, Midha became visibly emotional speaking in front of a slide that reads “Anj’s life scaling laws.” He told students about the importance of investing in personal relationships, not just work; Midha said he’s been too busy to ever go to the real Coachella.