Jensen Huang. Ben Horowitz. Sam Altman. Satya Nadella.
Although that sounds like the Sun Valley Conference guest list, it’s actually just part of an eye-popping lineup of speakers for a Stanford University computer science course starting this spring.
“Frontier Systems,” taught by professors Michael Abbott and Anjney Midha, will guide students through each layer of AI infrastructure — from chips to applications — over 10 weeks.
When Abbot began teaching the course four years ago, it was called “Security at Scale” and drew about 60 students. Now, the course has 500 students and a waitlist, Abbot said.
Part of the reason he and Midha chose to center the course on AI infrastructure was to prepare students for the real world, where it is becoming a key component across many industries.
Many companies are requiring staff to integrate AI into their day-to-day operations, meaning those who can properly use the tech could have an edge over other candidates. Business leaders like Reddit’s Steve Huffman and Figma’s Dylan Field have both praised young professionals for being AI natives.
Changing the name also allowed them to bring in guest speakers from companies like Google, Anthropic, Y Combinator, and AMD, a semiconductor company, who could speak directly to the AI landscape. Abbott said that the guest speakers can also give leadership advice to students.
“We said, ‘Hey, if I were a student right now, who do I want to listen to for their view on what I should or shouldn’t focus on?'” Abbott, who previously worked at Apple and General Motors, said.
The course has one project that encourages students to see what they can create and scale with AI over the semester.
“One person with the right AI tools can now produce what once required an organization. 10 weeks. One goal: Create value for the world. See how far you can scale yourself,” the course description says.
If that sounds a bit open-ended, it’s meant to.
“In this world, where you’re starting to see that one person can potentially build a billion-dollar company, what would that entail?” Abbott said.
Students will have to turn in their proposals by the end of this week, which will help the instructors firm up the parameters.
“That’s going to help us shape the boundaries of the project, but also it’ll help us understand the amount of compute that we need to secure for students to be able to do the projects,” Abbott said.
Here’s the full list of guest speakers for the course:
Amin Vahdat (Google), Amanda Askell (Anthropic), Andreas Blattman, (Black Forest Labs), Andrej Karpathy (Co-founder, OpenAI), Arthur Mensch (Mistral), Ashok Elluswamy (VP Autopilot, Tesla), Ben Horowitz (a16z), Brendan Iribe (Sesame · ex-Oculus CEO), Dave Baszucki (Roblox), David Holz (Midjourney), Dogus Cubuk (Periodic Labs), Garry Tan & Diana Hu (Y Combinator), Jensen Huang (NVIDIA), Liam Fedus (Periodic Labs), Lisa Su (AMD), Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs), Matthew Prince Cloudflare Michael Intrator (CoreWeave), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Satya Nadella (Microsoft), Sriram Krishnan (US Gov/White House).
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