Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star (#839)

Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence. Dr. Li served as the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. She was vice president at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud during her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017/2018.

She has served as a board member or advisor in various public and private companies and at the White House and United Nations. Dr. Li earned her BA in physics from Princeton in 1999 and her PhD in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She is the author of The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, her memoir and one of Barack Obama’s recommended books on AI and a Financial Times best book of 2023.

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Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Technology, and Finding Your North Star

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Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

Connect with Dr. Fei-Fei Li:

World Labs | Stanford | Twitter | LinkedIn

Books & Articles

The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI by Dr. Fei-Fei Li
How Fei-Fei Li Will Make Artificial Intelligence Better for Humanity | Wired
ImageNet Classification with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks | Communications of the ACM
Pattern Breakers: Why Some Start-Ups Change the Future by Mike Maples Jr. and Peter Ziebelman
Genentech: The Beginnings of Biotech by Sally Smith Hughes

Institutions, Organizations, & Culture

People

Universities, Schools, & Educational Programs

AI, Computer Science, & Data Concepts

Tools, Platforms, Models, & Products

Parenting, Sociology, & Culture Concepts

Tiger Parenting

Technical & Historical Items

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:00] Start.
[00:01:22] Why it’s so remarkable this is our first time meeting.
[00:03:21] From a childhood in Chengdu to New Jersey
[00:04:51] Being raised by the opposite of tiger parenting.
[00:07:53] Why Dr. Li’s brave parents left everything behind.
[00:11:17] Bob Sabella: The math teacher who sacrificed lunch hours for an immigrant kid.
[00:19:37] Seven years running a dry cleaning shop through Princeton.
[00:20:50] How ImageNet birthed modern AI.
[00:23:21] From fighter jets to physics to the audacious question: What is intelligence?
[00:27:24] The epiphany everyone missed: Big data as the hidden hypothesis.
[00:28:49] Against the single-genius myth: Science as non-linear lineage.
[00:32:18] Amazon Mechanical Turk: When desperation breeds innovation.
[00:39:03] Quality control puzzles: How do you stop people from seeing pandas everywhere?
[00:41:36] The “Godmother of AI” on what everyone’s missing: People.
[00:42:31] Civilizational technology: AI’s fingerprints on GDP, culture, and Japanese taxi screens.
[00:47:45] Pragmatic optimist: Why neither utopians nor doomsayers have it right.
[00:51:30] Why World Labs: Spatial intelligence as the next frontier beyond language.
[00:53:17] Packing sandwiches and painting bedrooms: Breaking down spatial reasoning.
[00:55:16] Medieval French towns on a budget: How World Labs serves high school theater.
[00:59:08] Flight simulators for robots and strawberry field therapy for OCD.
[01:01:42] The scientists who don’t make headlines: Spelke, Gopnik, Brooks, and the cognitive giants.
[01:03:16] What’s underappreciated: Spatial intelligence, AI in education, and the messy middle of labor.
[01:06:21] Hiring at World Labs: Why tool embrace matters more than degrees.
[01:08:50] Rethinking evaluation: Show students AI’s B-minus, then challenge them to beat it.
[01:11:24] Dr. Li’s Billboard.
[01:13:13] The fortuitous naming of Fei-Fei.
[01:14:46] Parting thoughts.

DR. FEI-FEI LI QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Really, at the end of the day, people are at the heart of everything. People made AI, people will be using AI, people will be impacted by AI, and people should have a say in AI.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“It turned out what physics taught me was not just the math and physics. It was really this passion to ask audacious questions.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“We’re all students of history. One thing I actually don’t like about the telling of scientific history is there’s too much focus on single genius.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“AI is absolutely a civilizational technology. I define civilizational technology in the sense that, because of the power of this technology, it’ll have—or [is] already having—a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political, downstream effects of our society.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“I believe humanity is the only species that builds civilizations. Animals build colonies or herds, but we build civilizations, and we build civilizations because we want to be better and better.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“What is your North Star?”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

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Want to hear another podcast episode with someone who helped build the computational foundations of modern AI? Listen to my conversation with legendary inventor Danny Hillis (and Wired founding executive editor Kevin Kelly), in which we discussed pioneering parallel computing at MIT, studying artificial intelligence under Marvin Minsky, building what experts called impossible, hiring Richard Feynman, working with Steve Jobs, 400+ patents, the distinction between “real AI” and imitation intelligence, and much more.