Andrew's controversial envoy emails were 'handed to palace six years ago'
An archive of 30,000 emails was reportedly handed to Buckingham Palace six years ago Source link
All posts tagged: Stanford
Fast-track ‘alumni’ boom: How short courses at Harvard and Stanford became big business
Achieving alumni status at an institution like the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School or Stanford used to mean years spent on campus and an outlay of hundreds of thousands of dollars. Now, some students can add top-tier schools to their resume after several weeks, and far less money. They’re attending a growing number of executive education programs across the U.S., contributing to a market that’s expected to swell to more than $1.2 billion over the next decade, according to estimates from trade group Unicon. Colleges are building new facilities and adding staff to bolster their offerings, as well as creating courses to keep up with demand and the trends of the moment. Right now, that means artificial intelligence: Wharton lists almost a dozen non-degree programs with AI in the title, while at MIT, participants can pay more than $12,000 to spend five days on campus immersed in “Leading the AI-Driven Organization.” The programs are a growing source of revenue for universities, some of which are facing financial crunches and higher taxes on their endowment earnings. …
Theo Baker spent four years investigating Stanford. Before he leaves, here’s what he found.
Most members of Stanford’s class of 2026 are smart, ambitious, and poised for remarkable careers. Theo Baker already has one. In his first semester of college, Baker broke the story that forced Stanford president Marc Tessier-Lavigne to resign — work that earned him a George Polk Award, one of journalism’s highest honors. Warner Brothers and producer Amy Pascal have optioned the rights to that story. And Tuesday, with graduation less than a month away, Baker publishes How to Rule the World, a sweeping account of his time at Stanford and the school’s often insidious relationship with the venture capital industry. Judging by early interest, it has every chance of becoming a bestseller. We’ve been anticipating this one (we shared some related thoughts about it just a few weeks ago). We talked with Baker last Friday. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. You showed up at Stanford as a coder. How did you end up breaking one of the biggest stories in the university’s history before your freshman year was even over? I …
The Stanford freshmen who want to rule the world . . . will probably read this book and try even harder
Theo Baker is graduating from Stanford this spring with something most seniors don’t have: a book deal, a George Polk Award that he received for his investigative reporting as a student journalist, and a front-row account of one of the most romanticized institutions in the world. His forthcoming How to Rule the World: An Education in Power at Stanford University was excerpted Friday in The Atlantic and based on that alone, I can’t wait to see the rest. The only question worth asking is the same one Baker himself might be too close to answer, which is: Can a book like this actually change anything? Or does the spotlight, as it always seems to, send more students racing to the place? The parallel that keeps coming to my mind is “The Social Network.” Aaron Sorkin wrote a film that was an indictment in many ways of the particular sociopathy that Silicon Valley tends to reward. What it seemingly did was make a generation of young people want to be Mark Zuckerberg. The cautionary tale became …
The Stanford Inside Stanford – The Atlantic
When I was a freshman at Stanford University, I learned to shotgun a beer from a guy in a frat. Soon after, he dropped out and started an AI company. Six months later, it was valued at more than $1 billion. For most students, Stanford is a normal competitive school, where people go to class and coffee shops and fall in love and freak out over finals. But a select few attend something else: a Stanford inside Stanford, where venture capitalists pursue 18- and 19-year-olds, handing out mentorships and money and invites to yacht parties in an attempt to convert promise into profit. Steve Blank teaches a legendary start-up class at the school, “Lean Launchpad.” Although students have always dreamed big, Blank told me that Stanford has changed in recent years, placing more and more emphasis on the young founders who may kick back some of their future billions to the university. Today, he said, “Stanford is an incubator with dorms.” AI seems poised to eliminate many entry-level jobs, but it has made this special …
At ‘AI Coachella,’ Stanford Students Line Up to Learn From Silicon Valley Royalty
As thousands of influencers descended on southern California earlier this month for the annual Coachella Music Festival, a very Silicon Valley program dubbed “AI Coachella” was taking shape a few hundred miles north in Palo Alto. The class, CS 153, is one of Stanford’s buzziest offerings this semester, and like the music festival, it features a star-studded lineup of celebrities—in this case, not pop artists, but Big Tech CEOs. The course is co-taught by Anjney Midha, a former Andreessen Horowitz general partner, and Michael Abbott, Apple’s former VP of engineering for cloud services. The list of guest lecturers reads like a Signal group chat many VCs would pay to join: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, AMD CEO Lisa Su, Anthropic philosopher Amanda Askell, and White House Senior Policy Advisor for AI Sriram Krishnan, among others. It’s the fourth year Midha and Abbott have taught some version of this class. Once registration went live this year, the class’s 500 seats quickly filled up, with dozens of students on the …
Want to understand the current state of AI? Check out these charts.
If you’re following AI news, you’re probably getting whiplash. AI is a gold rush. AI is a bubble. AI is taking your job. AI can’t even read a clock. The 2026 AI Index from Stanford University’s Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, AI’s annual report card, comes out today and cuts through some of that noise. Despite predictions that AI development may hit a wall, the report says that the top models just keep getting better. People are adopting AI faster than they picked up the personal computer or the internet. AI companies are generating revenue faster than companies in any previous technology boom, but they’re also spending hundreds of billions of dollars on data centers and chips. The benchmarks designed to measure AI, the policies meant to govern it, and the job market are struggling to keep up. AI is sprinting, and the rest of us are trying to find our shoes. All that speed comes at a cost. AI data centers around the world can now draw 29.6 gigawatts of power, enough to run …
Stanford study outlines dangers of asking AI chatbots for personal advice
While there’s been plenty of debate about the tendency of AI chatbots to flatter users and confirm their existing beliefs — also known as AI sycophancy — a new study by Stanford computer scientists attempts to measure how harmful that tendency might be. The study, titled “Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence” and recently published in Science, argues, “AI sycophancy is not merely a stylistic issue or a niche risk, but a prevalent behavior with broad downstream consequences.” According to a recent Pew report, 12% of U.S. teens say they turn to chatbots for emotional support or advice. And the study’s lead author, computer science Ph.D. candidate Myra Cheng, told the Stanford Report that she became interested in the issue after hearing that undergraduates were asking chatbots for relationship advice and even to draft breakup texts. “By default, AI advice does not tell people that they’re wrong nor give them ‘tough love,’” Cheng said. “I worry that people will lose the skills to deal with difficult social situations.” The study had two parts. …
In Stanford Show, Miljohn Ruperto Trolls the Death Drive of AI Guys
As I stood in front of a black screen, a luminous alien creature with five legs and translucent antennae appeared. After a minute, it morphed into an isopod with larger, more articulated limbs. Fathoms (Tartarapelagic), 2025–26, by Miljohn Ruperto, uses AI to generate otherworldly creatures like these, all based on species recently discovered in the Pacific Ocean’s Clarion-Clipperton Zone (CCZ). But there’s a dark irony: the extensive mining of manganese, nickel, copper, and cobalt in the CCZ—minerals essential for AI technology—have endangered the lives of the actual species. Related Articles Nearly every billboard on the road into Palo Alto—where Ruperto’s work is on view at Stanford’s Cantor Arts Center—advertises a different AI tool. There, Ruperto suggests that to know is partly to destroy. “I think of it as a moral position,” Ruperto said, when I asked him about this bind. “The current moment is directing us towards fractured individuation, and I want to show our entanglement, “ he explained—adding, with a smile, “It’s OK to be entangled.” He’s also showing a reanimation of a mile-high, …
Stanford researcher explains how beliefs alter physical reality
PsyPost’s PodWatch highlights interesting clips from recent podcasts related to psychology and neuroscience. On Thursday, November 20, The Psychology Podcast, hosted by Dr. Scott Barry Kaufman, featuring Dr. Alia Crum, explored the science behind the mind-body connection. Dr. Crum is a principal investigator at the Stanford Mind & Body Lab who studies how subjective mindsets can alter objective physiological realities. The episode focused on her groundbreaking experiments regarding the placebo effect, exercise, and the biological impact of our beliefs about food. At roughly the 8-minute mark, Dr. Crum describes an experiment she conducted with hotel housekeepers to test the placebo effect outside of a clinical setting. She discovered that while these women were physically active during their shifts, they did not believe they exercised enough to be healthy. Once researchers informed the workers that their job met the Surgeon General’s fitness guidelines, the women experienced measurable drops in weight and blood pressure despite not changing their daily behaviors. The conversation shifts to diet and metabolism around the 10-minute mark, specifically focusing on the hormone ghrelin. …