Brown CS Blog

by Devesh Kumar

It's not every day that you get a front-row seat to watch Sam Altman speak about AGI, followed immediately by a talk from Anthropic’s co-founder, and then later Elon Musk, Satya Nadella, and other top tech leaders, all within a two-day span. The CEOs of Cursor, Windsurf, and Replit all spoke about their respective products. I was one of about twenty-six Brown students among 2,500 of the students invited to the Y Combinator AI Startup School. Engulfing an entire warehouse on the San Francisco pier, the event featured incredible speakers, leaving me with new insights about Silicon Valley and Brown University’s unique elements, and the future of AI ventures.

I even got to ask the former CEOs of Windsurf and Co-Counsel questions after their talks. The long list of speakers included Andrew Ng, Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Nobel Prize winner John Jumper, and creator of the Keras library François Chollet. In my opinion, and the prevailing opinion among most I spoke to, the most incredible keynote was that from former director of Tesla AI, Andrej Karpathy. His talk was posted online as well, labeled “Andrej Karpathy: Software Is Changing (Again)” on YouTube (you can see me taking a seat 11 seconds in on the bottom right). This talk in particular was significant for the vision it laid out for the future of software over the next 10 years. This talk also helped me contextualize Brown’s place in the technology world after my first trip to the Bay Area.

To read the rest of this story and explore the latest issue of Conduit, the annual Brown CS magazine, click here.