Frontier Systems

Field notes from the people building the future.

[michael abbott @mabb0tt]

one of the privileges of teaching cs153 @stanford is getting to bring people into the room who have actually built the future.

several weeks ago, that person was @satyanadella he joined us in the middle of microsoft build, one of the biggest weeks on his calendar, and chose to spend part of it with a room full of students.

i haven’t stopped thinking about that. goes to show that the best builders never really stop building. and, for satya, that means investing in the people who will build it next.

catch the full session here: https://t.co/15kfRpX30U

[Anjney Midha @AnjneyMidha]

*New Lecture*

Stanford @frontiersystems '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 @frontiersystems 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 @frontiersystems '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 @frontiersystems 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 @frontiersystems '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 @frontiersystems '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 @frontiersystems, 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 @frontiersystems '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 @frontiersystems, 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 @frontiersystems 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: