As part of the Acceleration Economy AI Industry Accelerators series showcasing individuals in vendor, partner, and customer organizations who are driving AI innovation and adoption, here’s a look at the work of Dr. Fei-Fei Li.
Current Role
Dr. Li, sometimes called “the godmother of AI,” is a computer science professor at Stanford University, which she joined in 2009. Her research at Stanford includes cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, robotic learning, and AI + healthcare. She’s also the co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI). HAI’s mission is to advance AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition. Additionally, she co-founded the nonprofit AI4ALL, which is dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in AI education, research, and development.
Dr. Li’s first book, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI (Flatiron 2023), recently came out. Worlds is equal parts science and memoir, a dichotomy reflected in its Amazon reviews with one reviewer praising how “it captures the emergence of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) and then Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs),” and another gushing about how it’s “a testament to Dr. Li’s empathy and genuine concern for people.”
Educational/Professional Background
Li, the only child of Chinese immigrants, moved to the U.S. from China when she was 12. Her family settled in New Jersey, and she attended high school there, developing an interest in physics. She majored in the field as an undergraduate at Princeton, where she also studied computer science and engineering. She went on to obtain her doctorate in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. After graduation, she held positions at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Princeton before moving to Stanford in 2009. Li has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Li had the chance to work with Google on AI/ML during her sabbatical and collaborated with other companies, though she has spent most of her career in academia. Li said of choosing academia over industry, “Looking at where I am and at the exciting world of AI, I have absolutely no regrets. Was it scary? Yes . . . There were many moments where I was walking in the dark, figuratively speaking, and wondering if I’d made the right choice. So it wasn’t easy during those stretches of the journey. But what I find that makes me really grateful and excited is that now I’m working with all fields . . . that is very rewarding.”
| Title | Inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. |
| Previous employers | Google Cloud, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Princeton |
| Key AI Initiatives | ImageNet project, Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, AI4ALL |
| AI Passions | Ethics, Democratizing AI |
| In Her Own Words | ” . . . the most important use of a tool as powerful as AI is to augment humanity, not to replace it.” |
AI Projects and Passions
Li made her name with ImageNet, a database of annotated images to train AI, which she created in 2006. ImageNet is widely used for training and benchmarking computer vision algorithms, particularly in the field of deep learning. “One thing ImageNet changed in the field of AI is suddenly people realized the thankless work of making a dataset was at the core of AI research,” she said about the project.
Her many years in AI have led her to be the proponent of something she’s dubbed “human-centered AI.” in a 2023 interview with McKinsey: “There are also a lot of unknowns still to be explored in AI. How do we put guardrails around AI? How do we develop tomorrow’s AI? How do we move into the future, so that this technology can maximally benefit humanity and we can mitigate and govern the guardrails and the risks? We are calling for a human-centered AI framework.”
AI4ALL, Dr. Li’s nonprofit, is dedicated to bringing underrepresented groups into the AI field and has reached over 10,000 individuals worldwide. The nonprofit started with an idea of her student, Olga Russakovsky, who wanted to increase access to AI for these groups.
Latest News
Dr. Li is currently taking a two-year leave from Stanford and recently announced her latest venture, a startup called World Labs. Investors have valued the startup at $1 billion. World Labs will work toward AI gaining spatial intelligence, which can enable it to act. In a previous TED talk, Dr. Li expounded upon spatial intelligence and AI.
Ask Cloud Wars AI Agent about this analysis
Big Quote
“A lot of people, especially in Silicon Valley, talk about increased productivity. As a technologist, I absolutely believe in increased productivity, but that doesn’t automatically translate into shared prosperity. And that’s a societal level issue. So no matter if you look at the individual, community, or society, a human-centered approach to AI is important.”
More AI Industry Accelerators
- “AI Industry Accelerators: Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei Keeps Humans at the Center of AI“
- “AI Industry Accelerators: Salesforce AI CEO Clara Shih Advances Trust, Responsibility“
- “AI Industry Accelerators: OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Embraces Responsible AI Mission – Acceleration Economy“
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