From Bloomberg, November 21:
Stanford scientist Fei-Fei Li talks about teaching machines to see as humans do, the US-China AI arms race, and what worries her about a more automated future.
AI is now so present in our lives that the story of how it came to be so is receding — that is, if we ever absorbed it properly. It’s a tale of scientists laboring for years in the hope of one day making machines intelligent, and breaking down the components of human intelligence in order to get there.
Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li was at the forefront of that quest, which is why she has been called the “godmother of AI.” In 2006 she released her academic work on a visual database containing millions of images, and the idea of training computers to “see” as humans do sparked a wave of AI development.
Behind this breakthrough is a woman with an unusual background, one that plays a role in how she sees the world. Li arrived in the US at age 15 when her parents emigrated from China. She spoke little English and had to adjust academically, socially and financially to a new environment; after her parents set up a small dry-cleaning business to make ends meet, she ran it through her college years.
When Li came into Bloomberg headquarters in London, we talked about her personal and professional history, and I found in her a deep sensitivity. Excited about the potential of technology she’s helped create, she also emphasizes human agency — you’ll find her message to parents towards the end.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity. You can listen to an extended version in the latest episode of The Mishal Husain Show podcast.
May I start with this remarkable period for your industry? It’s been three years since ChatGPT was released to the public. Since then there have been new vehicles, new apps and huge amounts of investment. How does this moment feel to you?
AI is not new to me. I’ve been in this field for 25 years. I’ve lived and breathed it every day since the beginning of my career. Yet this moment is still daunting and almost surreal to me, in terms of its massive, profound impact.
This is a civilizational technology. I’m part of the group of scientists that made this happen and I did not expect it to be this massive.
11 Li spoke to us while in London to receive the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and five others. Li has previously written and spoken about what she’s called “the AI winter” of the early 21st century, when those working in the field were getting no attention.When was the moment it changed? Is it because of the pace of developments or because the world has woken up and therefore turned the spotlight on people like you?
I think it’s intertwined, right? But for me to define this as a civilizational technology is not about the spotlight. It’s not even about how powerful it is. It is about how many people it impacts.
Everyone’s life, work, wellbeing, future, will somehow be touched by AI.
AI Investment Surge
Capital spending on AI-related activities exceeds half of all investment...***In bad ways as well as good?
Well, technology is a double-edged sword, right? Since the dawn of human civilization, we have created tools we call technologies, and these tools are meant, in general, for doing good things. Along the way we might intentionally use them in the wrong way, or they might have unintended consequences.
In bad ways as well as good?
Well, technology is a double-edged sword, right? Since the dawn of human civilization, we have created tools we call technologies, and these tools are meant, in general, for doing good things. Along the way we might intentionally use them in the wrong way, or they might have unintended consequences.
You said the word powerful. The power of this technology is in the hands of a very small number of companies, most of them American. How does that sit with you?
You are right. The major tech companies — through their products — are impacting our society the most. I would personally like to see this technology being much more democratized.
No matter who builds, or holds, the profound impact of this technology: Do it in a responsible way.
I also believe every individual should feel they have the agency to impact this technology.
You are a tech CEO as well as an academic. Your very young company, little more than a year old, is reportedly already worth a billion dollars.
Yes! [Laughs]
I am co-founder and CEO of World Labs. We are building the next frontier of AI — spatial intelligence — which people don’t hear too much about today because we’re all about large language models. I believe spatial intelligence is as critical [as] — and complementary to — language intelligence.
22 World Labs raised more than $200 million ahead of its launch in 2024. In a TED Talk she delivered that year, Li said: “If we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do.”I know that your first academic love was physics.
Yes.
What was it in the life or work of the physicists you most admired that made you think beyond that particular field?
I grew up in a small, or less well known, city in China. And I come from a small family. So you could say life was small, in a sense. My childhood was fairly simple and isolated. I was the only child.
33 Li grew up in Chengdu in China’s Sichuan Province; her mother was a teacher and her father worked in the computer department of a chemicals factory. In her book The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, she linked her professional path to her early years: “Research triggered the same feeling I got as a child exploring the mountains surrounding Chengdu with my father, when we’d spot a butterfly we’d never seen before, or happen upon a new variety of stick insect.”Physics is almost the opposite — it’s vast, it’s audacious. The imagination is unbounded. You look up in the sky, you can ponder the beginning of the universe. You look at a snowflake, you can zoom into the molecular structure of matter. You think about time, magnetic fields, nuclear.
It takes my imagination to places that you can never be in this world. What fascinates me to this day about physics is to not be afraid of asking the boldest, [most] audacious questions about our physical world, our universe [and] where we come from.
But your own audacious question, I think, was What is intelligence?
Yes. Each physicist I admire, I look at their audacious question, right from [Isaac] Newton to [James Clerk] Maxwell to [Erwin] Schrödinger to Einstein — my favorite physicist.
I wanted to find my own audacious question. Somewhere in the middle of college, my audacious question shifted from physical matters to intelligence. What is it? How does it come about? And most fascinatingly, How do we build intelligent machines? That became my quest, my north star.
And that’s a quantum leap because, from machines that were doing calculations and computations, you’re talking about machines that learn, that are constantly learning.
I like [that] you use the physics pun, the quantum leap.
Around us right now, there are multiple objects. We know what they are. The ability that humans have to recognize objects is foundational. My PhD dissertation was to build machine algorithms to recognize as many objects as possible.
What I found really interesting about your background is that you were reading very widely. And your ultimate breakthrough was possible when you started thinking about what psychologists and linguists were saying that was related to your field.
That’s the beauty of doing science at the forefront. It’s new, no one knows how to do it.
It’s pretty natural to look at the human brain and human mind and try to understand, or be inspired by, what humans can do. One of the inspirations in my early days of trying to unlock this visual intelligence problem was to look at how our visual semantic space is structured. There are so many tens and thousands, millions, of objects in the world. How are they organized? Are they organized by alphabet, or by size or colors?
44 While doing her PhD at Caltech, Li became convinced that larger datasets would be crucial to AI progress. Later, she was influenced by neuroscientist and psychologist Irving Biederman’s paper on human image understanding, which estimated that the average person recognizes around 30,000 different kinds of objects....
....MUCH MORE
"Fei-Fei Li’s Startup Allows You to Walk in the 3D World of Edward Hopper Paintings"
The godmother of AI.
From Observer, December 4:
The new startup is working to develop A.I. models with so-called "spatial intelligence."
World Labs, a startup co-founded by Stanford A.I. pioneer Fei-Fei Li earlier this year that quickly grabbed the attention of high-profile investors, has remained relatively quiet on its products—until now. The startup yesterday (Dec. 3) provided a glimpse of one of its early projects, which takes the form of virtual 3D scenes generated from a 2D image. “This will change how we make movies, games, simulators and other digital manifestations of our physical worlds,” said World Labs in a blog post accompanied by interactive examples of its 3D worlds. The preview shines a light on Li’s larger efforts to develop A.I. models that have “spatial intelligence” and can understand and interact with the real world....
....MUCH MORE
Ha, that's nothin'. Iowahawk (David Burge) has been inserting himself into Nighthawks for years.
Previously on the good Professor:
May 2024 - "‘Godmother of A.I.’ Fei-Fei Li On Why You Shouldn’t Trust Any A.I. Company"
It's not the technology that should be feared it is the people using the technology.
In March 2016 this seemed noteworthy:
The Hottest PhD Market In the World
From The .Plan: A Quasi-Blog:
Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University professor who is an expert in computer vision, said one of her Ph.D. candidates had an offer for a job paying more than $1 million a year, and that was only one of four from big and small companies.
--John Markoff and Steve Lohr, NYT, on the brains arms race in artificial intelligence
And in May 2024 this did:
Former Google CEO Schmidt On The Ever-Increasing Tempo Of AI
Gardels: One thing that worries Fei-Fei Li of the Stanford Institute on Human-Centered AI is the asymmetry of research funding between the Microsofts and Googles of the world and even the top universities. As you point out, there are hundreds of billions invested in compute power to climb up the capability ladder in the private sector, but scarce resources for safe development at research institutes, no less the public sector....
....Eventually, in both the U.S. and China, I suspect there will be a small number of extremely powerful computers with the capability for autonomous invention that will exceed what we want to give either to our own citizens without permission or to our competitors. They will be housed in an army base, powered by some nuclear power source and surrounded by barbed wire and machine guns.....
Again, only those with massive amounts of cash will be able to maximize the benefits of AI.
See advantage flywheels and hyper-Pareto distribution of profits if interested.
And possibly most important:
March 18 - In Nvidia's World, If You (and your company) Don't Have Money You Will Not Be Able To Compete (NVDA)
So:"'AI godmother' Fei-Fei Li raises $230 million to launch AI startup"
