Frontier Systems

Field notes from the people building the future.

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

*New Lecture*

Stanford @CS153Systems '26, Session 8

The Compute Behind Intelligence with Jensen Huang from @nvidia

full link in comment - this clip is just the one where he talks about tomatoes

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

live today at 12pm pst on @CS153Systems office hours with Senior White House Policy Advisor on AI @Sriramk

bring your questions

https://t.co/IVFFZVoMih

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

PSA: several folks have asked where they can find the full stanford @CS153Systems '26 lectures

they are uploaded each week on the official @Stanford online youtube channel and we've also created a playlist of them here for easy discovery:

https://t.co/T6zFZ2O7wc

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

this will be an inside look at @AnthropicAI's frontier systems design process

happening in 20 mins live on youtube

come lunch and learn at @CS153Systems office hours!

[Prithvi Rajasekaran @rgb_prithvi]

Excited to be joining Stanford CS 153 Office Hours tomorrow with @AnjneyMidha! We’ll be chatting about agent harnesses, long running agents and answering live Q&A. Link in thread 🧵

[Anastasios Nikolas Angelopoulos @ml_angelopoulos]

Excited to join Stanford CS 153 Office Hours tomorrow: Friday, May 1st at 12PM PT with @AnjneyMidha and @Mabb0tt.

Live Q&A. Come say hi - link in thread.

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

*New Lecture*

Stanford @CS153Systems '26, Session 8 (Full Video)

Energy Bottlenecks with @ScottNolan from @generalmatter

00:00 Energy Bottlenecks Intro
00:11 AI Factory Overview
02:55 Why Power Matters
03:56 From ChatGPT to Enterprise Demand
07:25 Meet Scott Nolan
09:03 Energy Is The Real Limit
11:16 Demand Growth Reality Check
13:17 Stranded Power Era
15:54 What Data Centers Need
16:59 Nuclear As Baseload Path
18:21 Fuel Cycle And Enrichment Gap
21:41 Bitcoin Mining As Rehearsal
25:03 Building Primitives Not Pivots
28:17 Nuclear Safety And Narrative
30:22 Calibrating the Moment
30:54 Pick Important Problems
32:14 General Matter Breakthrough
35:04 Building Team and Site
37:18 Government Support Reality
39:19 Jobs and AI Demand
42:37 Scaling Timelines and Space
46:16 Early SpaceX Lessons
50:25 Nuclear Perception and Europe
53:17 Supply Chain and Enrichment
56:56 Why US Lost Enrichment
59:25 Back to the Future Wrap

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

*New Lecture*

Stanford @CS153Systems '26, Session 5 (Full Video)

Unified Intelligence with Amit Jain (@gravicle) from @LumaLabsAI

01:32 Luma's Origin Story
05:33 Differentiable World Learning
06:36 From 3D Capture To Video
10:40 Dream Machine Flywheel
13:48 Inside The Luma Factory
23:04 Unified Models Explained
32:29 Future Architectures
34:02 Skills and Tools
41:04 Creativity and Exploration
43:03 Sora Shutdown
47:08 GANs Diffusion and Hybrids
51:19 Hollywood Business Model Reset
55:01 What Makes Video Models Useful

[Vivian Midha Shen @vivianmshen]

scaling laws at Stanford today

kicking off an incredible CS153 for the 4th year running with @AnjneyMidha @mabb0tt and a GOAT speaker lineup

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

*New Lecture*

Stanford @CS153Systems, Session 4 (Full Video)

Frontier Visual Intelligence Systems with @andi_blatt from @bfl_ml

00:00 Bella Napoli
00:56 Frontier Flywheel Recap
04:29 Intro to Andi
06:26 From GANs to Latent Diffusion
08:31 Stable Diffusion Breakthrough
15:20 Beyond Content Creation
18:28 Starting Black Forest Labs
21:07 Flux One Training Pipeline
24:15 Character Consistency Leap
27:02 Leadership Under Pressure
30:40 What Comes Next
32:06 Training to Action
41:07 Self Flow Intuition
48:35 Labeling and Distillation
57:09 3D vs Video Debate

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

Stanford @CS153Systems '26, Session 3 (Full lecture)

The Future of Voice Systems with @matiii from @ElevenLabs

00:00 Welcome and Intro
01:31 Origin Story on Discord
05:15 The Dubbing Problem
07:44 Pipeline and Early Pivot
12:38 Building the First Model
15:24 Compute Costs and Patents
17:34 Roadmap Through 2025
22:00 Cascaded vs Fused Agents
30:38 Collaboration Over Competition
35:05 Revenue Growth and Team Design
37:56 Predictable Deployment Engine
42:32 Voice Safety and Watermarking
44:27 Research Bottlenecks Personalization
46:24 Training Tradeoffs Cascade vs Fuse
48:20 Five Year Vision Platform
51:08 Impact Work ALS and Ukraine
54:40 China Distillation and Openness
59:24 Studios AI Voice Economics
01:03:04 On Device Models and Platform Gap
01:04:36 Enterprise Tooling and Wrap Up

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

Stanford @CS153Systems, Week 1 (Full Lecture)

AI Scaling, Bottlenecks, and Why Compute Isn't a Commodity Yet

00:00 Compute Coachella
00:29 Simple Life Heuristic
01:08 Uncertainty Creates Opportunity
01:42 Four Bottlenecks Framework
01:51 Empirical Proof Matters
02:05 Cloud Costs Are Shifting
02:15 Verifiable vs Fuzzy Progress
02:48 Scaling Predictability Explained
03:43 CapEx Explosion in Big Tech
04:06 Chips Aren’t Commodities
04:45 Compute Scarcity Conclusion

[Max Zeff @ZeffMax]

@AnjneyMidha @AmandaAskell @AnthropicAI @CS153Systems CS153: The Coachella of Frontier AI Systems

[sshkhr @sshkhr16]

(1/7) Everyone's been piling on the https://t.co/Y095Nvlf7U syllabus at @Stanford by @AnjneyMidha and @mabb0tt as being too high-level (I saw some comparisons being made to Ted Talks, even Coachella 😅)

fwiw I personally think this is a great class, and its probably significantly more value in-person than online. I saw the lectures with @GuillaumeLample and @sualehasif996 from the Winter 2025 session and personally found them very informative.

But if you're looking for a deeper dive into frontier AI systems, here are 5 courses (and a few other resources) you will like: