I work for a commmodity / trading / shipping company. We wanted to invest and bring the whole management group for 5 day trip to Silicon Valley, focused on AI and LLM technologies.
The idea was to expose a cross-functional group to the epicentre of innovation – to learn how leading tech companies actually use AI commercially, and bring back insights we could action.
The price tag? USD 500,000 for a week-long program for 10 people. That included visits, some programming, and facilitation. Unsurprisingly, we decided not to go ahead – but the desire to learn at the source is still very much alive. Our idea of a reasonable price tag is around USD 150,000 (where we recon half will go to flights and hotels).
So I turn to the Hacker News community:
1. Is it possible to arrange meaningful company visits to places like Google, OpenAI, or Anthropic without going through a costly middleman? How accessible are these companies for learning-focused groups?
2. Are top-tier universities like Stanford or Berkeley open to group visits, guest lectures, or curated AI sessions for international teams?
3. Are there local Bay Area companies or freelancers that help organise high-impact, cost-effective tech immersion trips?
4. Have you done this kind of trip before — what worked, what flopped, and what should we absolutely not miss if we self-organise?
Any advice, contacts, or shared experiences are welcome.
Thanks!
First off, visiting companies and universities - building LLM's and using them are quite different beasts. If your management team is not highly educated in the area of ML, this will mostly be useless to them, besides any "business development" discussions one might have with people who do that at OpenAI or Google.
What you are looking for is an "Applied AI" course. And still here, you'll get sold a lot of cheap bullshit for a high price. The amount of people actually good and capable of using LLM's at a high level is still quite low, but the amount of hustlers and influencers selling basic prompts and cheap ideas is large. I've seen people do this training and it basically turns out "heres this 5 popular tools, here's how to ask ChatGPT, heres a few good prompts" and thanks for the money. Beware of that, as you'll probably get peddled that by software agencies as one step in their funnel.
What you'd need, and what you can definitely get for that price tag, is a week long curated education program based on both the tech skill level of your management group and your industry. IMO, this would look quite a bit different and here's how it would ideally look:
1. Having an interview with the people included to estimate the skill level
2. Be given an insight into your workflow and a chance to observe it
3. Prepare a program dedicated to your team/industry
4. Get everyone out to a large bnb somewhere for a week
5. Have a combination of talks, QA's & "hackatons", where you will learn, build, learn again, build again, while having a chance to ask somebody real questions.
You'll get out of this with more insights and experience than a few random visits to companies, and with the building, develop an intuition for how actually it works and what you can do with it.