About us
Silicon Valley practice, taught as work you do.
BayAIU — hands-on AI education connecting Silicon Valley practice with what learners actually need.
We are based in the Bay Area and we teach in English and Chinese. This page says who is behind the courses, exactly what our university partner does and on which courses, who teaches, how a session actually runs, and what the certificate is and is not.
§01
Who we are
BayAIU is run jointly by California Science & Technology University (CSTU) and BayAI Circle, a Silicon Valley AI community. We would rather tell you exactly what that partnership covers than leave you with the words “university backing.” It is not the same on every course, so here it is course by course.
| Course | Produced by | What CSTU does on it |
|---|---|---|
| Everyday AI for beginners (AI 八讲) | CSTU × BayAI Circle | Curriculum co-developed with CSTU; the certificate of completion is co-issued by CSTU and BayAI Circle. |
| AI one-person company (OPCS) | CSTU × BayAI Circle | Curriculum co-developed with CSTU; certificate co-issued. The in-person sessions of the (now finished) live season were held on the CSTU campus — 1601 McCarthy Blvd, Milpitas, CA — and at the BayAIU office, 401 Lambert Ave, Palo Alto, CA. |
| AI marketing & customer acquisition (OPCM) | BayAI Circle | Not a CSTU co-production. Its certificate of completion is issued by BayAI Circle alone and does not carry CSTU's name. |
| Enterprise AI delivery bootcamp (FDE) | BayAI Circle | Not a CSTU co-production. Its certificate of completion is issued by BayAI Circle alone and does not carry CSTU's name. |
| Muse in Practice (Muse 实战课) | BayAI Circle | Nothing. Muse in Practice is produced by BayAI Circle alone, which also issues its certificate of completion. |
Where CSTU co-produces a course, that means two specific things: the curriculum is developed together, and the certificate of completion carries both names. It does not mean the course is a CSTU degree program, and it does not mean CSTU has reviewed or endorsed the courses it does not co-produce.
§02
Who teaches
Which instructor teaches which sessions is listed on each course page.
Founder & CEO · Lead instructor
Jimmy Cai
Visiting professor at California Science & Technology University (CSTU). Co-founder of BayAI Circle and of the AGI Summit, and an early founder of the OPC (one-person company) community. Interviewed by World Journal and NetEase North America. He teaches the Silicon Valley trends session and the monetization tracks.
Technical instructor
Daniel
Core technical instructor at BayAI Circle. He runs the hands-on AI tooling sessions — OpenClaw, Hermes, Codex, Claude Code — turning an idea into something that actually runs, and he leads weeks 2–3 of the FDE bootcamp: structured prompting, RAG retrieval and reranking, agents and MCP tool calling, and evals in production.
Senior Advisor
Paul Marca
- Role at BayAIU
- Senior Advisor.
- What that covers
- The specific scope — which courses he reviews, how often, and what he signs off on — is 【to confirm】. Until it is written down here, please do not read his advisory role as approval of any particular course.
- Does he teach?
- No. He is an advisor, not an instructor on any current course.
His own background
Former Associate Vice Provost at Stanford University and former Executive Director of the Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD), where he spent 32 years. He launched Stanford's first online master's degree in 1996, oversaw 250+ industry-facing courses a year, and took Stanford programs into more than ten countries. He is founding principal of Parallax Global Advisors, co-leads the Luminarian Fellowship on AI-era innovation leadership with Stanford Engineering, advises Eightfold.AI among others, and serves as First Vice President of IACEE.
The paragraph above is his personal career history. It is not a statement by Stanford University, SCPD, or any organization named in it, and it is not an endorsement of BayAIU or of any BayAIU course.
§03
How we teach
This is the part that is actually different, so it is worth being specific about. Seven rules the courses are built on.
- 01
Every session ends in something you made
Not notes, not a reading list — a poster, a deck, a report, a landing page, a post that is actually live. If a session does not end in something you can point at, the session is wrong.
- 02
The instructor goes through the room one person at a time
What you write in class lands in the instructor's back office as you write it, and the instructor reads it live and sets the order for the one-by-one round. Half-finished is fine — the round exists to fix half-finished work.
- 03
Seven gates before anything is published
On courses where students publish, every draft runs a seven-check review: sourcing, promises, risk shifted onto the reader, regulated-advice lines, whether it still works if you swap the recipient, whether the opening is a real quote, and what the reader is left holding. Gates 1–4 a machine can pre-screen; gates 5–7 only you can clear — and the approve button is only ever pressed by a person.
- 04
A phone is enough to take the class
Every hands-on step has a path that needs no computer: paste the same prompt into any AI chat window and you get the same output. Students on a phone are not on a reduced version of the course.
- 05
The support does not stop when the session ends
Questions go to the student community and to in-app messages from your dashboard, and a real person answers. Some programs add structured coaching for the length of the cohort — the OPCM small-group bootcamp runs coaching across all six weeks. What each course includes is on that course's own page.
- 06
Homework is graded on one thing: does the link open
For publishing assignments there is no rubric and no word count. Either the thing is out there and the link opens, or it is not done. It keeps the work honest and it keeps the feedback fast.
- 07
No income promises, in any course, ever
No instructor, no page, and no partner of ours may promise you income, follower growth, admission, or a job. That rule is written into how we build the courseware, not added to the footer afterwards.
§04
Certificate & compliance
- The certificate
- Every certificate of completion comes with a public, verifiable link. On the courses CSTU co-produces it is co-issued by CSTU × BayAI Circle; on the others it is issued by BayAI Circle alone. The certificate names its own issuer — see the table above.
- What it is not
- It certifies completion. It is not a degree, not academic credit, and not a professional licence. It does not transfer to a degree program and it does not qualify you to practise anything.
- How you earn it
- Live cohort: attendance of 80% or more, plus a submitted final project. Self-paced video course: watch all of the session recordings in full.
- BPPE registration
- Our registration with California's Bureau for Private Postsecondary Education (BPPE) is in progress. Nothing on this site should be read as saying registration is complete. Our courses are non-degree training.
- Operating entity
- A California joint venture. Full legal name of the contracting entity: 【to confirm】 — it will be named here and on your receipt once it is registered.
- Claims we do not make
- We do not promise income, follower growth, admission to any institution, or a job — on this site, in any course, or through any partner.
- The binding documents
- Prices, dates, and sale status are on each course page and those pages govern. See also the Terms of Service, the Refund Policy, and the Privacy Policy.
Talk to us
Write to contact@bayaiu.ai — a real person reads it. Tell us where you are starting from and we will tell you which course fits, or that none of them does.