Shaq, Sam Altman-backed college startup Campus taps former Meta AI head as CTO (www.cnbc.com)

Campus, the Sam Altman- and Shaq-backed startup aiming to reimagine community college, has hired former Meta AI chief Jerome Pesenti as CTO and acquired his AI learning company Sizzle AI for an undisclosed sum. The deal brings Sizzle’s personalized, AI-generated educational content—already used by about 1.7 million people—into Campus’s platform and, according to founder Tade Oyerinde, accelerates the company’s engineering roadmap by two to three years. Campus offers accredited associate degrees to roughly 3,000 students, charges $7,320 per year, accepts Pell Grants, and has raised north of $100 million from investors including Founders Fund, General Catalyst, Dylan Field and Joe Lonsdale. For the AI/ML community the move signals a push to operationalize large-scale, personalized tutoring and curriculum generation inside accredited higher-education pathways. Key technical implications include integrating Sizzle’s content-generation models into a production LMS, scaling personalization pipelines, and instrumenting outcomes tracking for model evaluation and fairness. The acquisition creates opportunities (and responsibilities) around data use, model fine-tuning to diverse learner populations, continuous assessment metrics, and privacy/compliance in a regulated education context—making this a notable case study in deploying adaptive AI at institutional scale.