500 and counting: the CS class students are lining up to take

CS 153: Frontier Systems may have a 500-student capacity, but it still has a waitlist. The course will feature a star-studded cast of AI pioneers as guest speakers, including OpenAI co-founder and CEO Sam Altman and NVIDIA founder and CEO Jensen Huang M.S. ’92.

“We’re now living through the explosion of a new industry, which is frontier AI,” said Anjney Midha ’15 M.S. ’15, one of the two lead instructors for the course. “Why don’t we take a second to bring everybody back to the birthplace and remind everybody of the values, the culture, the roots that even enabled all of this.”

Midha and his co-instructor, Michael Abbott, see the course as a part of a bigger mission to democratize information about the rapidly changing AI landscape. They made an effort to select speakers from every level of AI development, including government officials like senior White House policy advisor and 2025 Time person of the year Sriram Krishnan. 

All of the content from the class is publicly available on the course’s YouTube channel. The opening lecture video has already amassed over 230,000 views.  

“This year, we decided that we wanted to really focus on how do we help prepare students for this kind of radical world that we’re in with AI and bring in the people who are are leading companies that are pioneering the space to share with the students how they should be thinking about their careers and how do they think about the problems in the domain,” said Abbott.

The course has a lighthearted feel despite its lofty goals. The class offers a Discord channel for students to pose questions and lectures begin with background music. Guest speakers each week are also a surprise to students.

“Every time you go, it’s like a mystery box, like an unboxing. You never know what famous person is going to be talking,” said Tony Wang ’27, a computer science major taking the class this quarter. Wang added that “the energy of the class is great.”

The class has managed to attract attention “across the Stanford ecosystem,” according to Wang. Though the class is primarily attended by CS majors, students across domains have already started tuning in. 

Abbott and Midha see this course as a perfect fit for Stanford on two fronts, as the university is both a birthplace for AI and a breeding ground for future leaders in the field. 

“I feel like these are the students that are going to be leading the next wave of frontier [AI] companies, and I think giving them both the technical depth as well as leadership insights is what’s going to help, frankly, the U.S. and just a broader field of AI to advance,” said Abbott.

The class is in its fourth year, but it hasn’t been a linear trajectory. It was first titled “Security at Scale,” and initially focused on exposing undergrads to the wide range of security work happening at companies like Roblox or Reddit. The course has now shifted its aim to preparing students for rapid developments in AI.

“I think this next decade is going to be a challenging time to navigate,” Abbott said.

The instructors also see this course as filling a gap that exists both at Stanford and other universities — a systems view across a particular discipline. According to Abbott, this course in particular provides a unique view into the private sector, unlike many other classes on campus. 

Abbott and Midha have both been able to put their personal experience with technology to good use in the classroom. Abbott spent time at Apple running iCloud, and Midha’s research with Periodic Labs worked to improve AI models’ physical reasoning abilities. 

“As an alum, I feel a deep obligation to give back,” Midha said.

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