Stanford University

Stanford University provides undergraduate and graduate education and conducts research across seven schools, including engineering, medicine, business, and the humanities. Its offerings extend to online courses for the public and executive and policy education through the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). HAI funds research, trains early-career scholars, and produces the annual AI Index, connecting technical work with questions about AI’s economic and societal effects.

Founded in 1885 by Leland Stanford and Jane Lathrop Stanford, the university opened in 1891 and is now led by President Jonathan Levin. Its AI research includes FlashAttention, an algorithm that accelerates Transformer attention without approximation. By computing in blocks and avoiding large intermediate matrices in GPU memory, it reduces memory traffic and makes attention more efficient for model training and inference.

Stanford reported enrollment of 7,289 undergraduates and 10,025 graduate students in autumn 2025. Its funding includes student income, sponsored research, endowment income, gifts, and health care services. In 2026, Stanford announced that Stanford HAI and Stanford Data Science would combine under the HAI name, led by James Landay. The planned structure brings together HAI’s research and policy network with Data Science’s Marlowe computing cluster and fellowship program, linking computational resources with research across disciplines.