Who Is Fei-Fei Li? The Godmother of AI

While the phrase “godfather of AI” gets thrown around a lot, there’s only one undisputed “godmother of AI,” Dr. Fei-Fei Li.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is one of the most well-known AI researchers in the world, having gone from constructing ImageNet, which has helped train countless computer vision systems and neural networks to identify objects, to building a spatial intelligence startup worth $1 billion in just a matter of months.

Li has been ahead of the curve in computer vision, building critical infrastructure that other researchers have used to enhance the ability of models to identify objects in images and real-world environments.

So, who is Fei-Fei Li? In this article, we explore her latest projects, career path, and future plans.

Who Is Fei-Fei Li?

Professional Life & Current Roles

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist who is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. Li also served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018.

According to Forbes, Dr. Fei-Fei Li has written over 100 scientific articles throughout her academic career and landed a spot on lists, including The World’s Top 50 Women in Tech (2018) and America’s Top 50 Women in Tech (2018). Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s net worth is undisclosed.

Li has also had a number of roles in the private sector, acting as vice president at Google from January 2017 to September 2018, as well as serving as the chief scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. She has also served as a board advisor to leading tech companies like Twitter.

Li is also the founder of AI4ALL, a non-profit organization that aims to advocate for increasing inclusion and diversity in AI research, development, and policy.

Finally, Li has been a trusted advisor to the U.S. government, serving as a special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations, acting as a member of the California Future of Work Commission for the Governor of California, and a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Task Force.

Her latest venture, World Labs, was launched in 2024.

Fei-Fei Li’s Active Positions

What Is Fei-Fei Li Famous For?

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is mainly known for producing ImageNet, which was released in 2009 with over 14 million images. ImageNet was a big deal because it provided a free resource that researchers could use to train deep learning models and neural networks on how to identify objects in images.

The images included with ImageNet came with labels describing images in over 20,000 categories. These labels would enable the machine to see what image/object was associated with a certain keyword.

ImageNet’s widespread usage among the AI and ML research community has led to Dr. Fei-Fei Li being regarded as one of the most influential AI researchers of the 21st century, listed on Time’s 100 Most Influential in AI list.

Fei Fei Li’s TED Talk, “With spatial intelligence, AI will understand the real world,” also garnered significant attention and was viewed over 950,000 times.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s book, “The Worlds I See,” was also released in 2024 to a positive critical reception. It achieved a 4.7 rating on Amazon and a 4.4 rating on Goodreads.

The book documents Li’s personal journey to becoming a leading AI scientist.

Fei-Fei Li’s ‘Spatial Intelligence’ Startup

In May 2024, Reuters reported that Dr. Fei-Fei Li launched a new spatial intelligence startup, now known as World Labs, that was processing visual data to help develop AI models capable of advanced reasoning, with seed funding from investors including Andreessen Horowitz and Radical Ventures.

Just months later, the startup has grown to a valuation of $1 billion, a high amount even among AI startups. According to The Financial Times, the idea behind the solution is to identify an object’s dimensions, as well as where it is and what it does.

At its heart, the startup is trying to give AI models the ability to emulate how humans see and interpret the world around them.

If successful, World Labs could have significant implications for fields like robotics and autonomous driving, enabling machines to better navigate and interact with their local environment.

But the real power of seeing is doing. The urge to act is innate for beings with spatial intelligence, which links perception with action. So to advance AI beyond what its capabilities today, we need more than AI that can see or talk. We need AI that can do. 5/ pic.twitter.com/Ek94YMazkh

— Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) May 15, 2024

What’s Next?

Knowing what’s next for Dr. Fei-Fei Li is tricky given her wide-ranging career, but the early success of World Labs suggests that developing visual data to improve computer vision will remain a focus for the foreseeable future.

It is likely that her innovations will also continue to contribute to key areas of AI application, including robotics, autonomous vehicles, and medical imaging, which rely on computer vision to process images at scale.

More About Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li’s Education & Early Life

Fei-Fei Li was born on July 3, 1976, in Beijing China in 1976.  She then lived in Chengdu, Sichuan, China, until the age of 15, at which point she moved to the United States to live in Parsippany-Troy Hills, New Jersey.

Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s educational background can be traced back to Parsippany High School in 1995, where she developed the knowledge required to pursue a BA degree in physics at Princeton University. She then went on to obtain her PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005.

Li’s PhD dissertation, “Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics,” was completed under the supervision of Pietro Perona and Chrisof Koch, and broke down how computer vision could be used to mimic human object and scene recognition.

After achieving her PhD, Li became an assistant professor at the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign from 2005 to 2006 and then an assistant professor at the Computer Science Department at Princeton University from 2007 to 2009.

The Bottom Line

Dr. Fei-Fei Li has played a pivotal role in helping computer vision technologies become what they are today. ImageNet provided private and academic researchers with a vast repository on which they could train their models on for free.

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