Saturday, December 13, 2025
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Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Know-how, and Discovering Your North Star (#839)


Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) is the inaugural Sequoia Professor within the Pc Science Division at Stanford College, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI firm specializing in Spatial Intelligence. Dr. Li served because the director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. She was vice chairman at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud throughout her sabbatical from Stanford in 2017/2018.

She has served as a board member or advisor in numerous private and non-private corporations and on the White Home 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 Know-how (Caltech) in 2005. She is the writer of The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery on the Daybreak of AI, her memoir and certainly one of Barack Obama’s really helpful books on AI and a Monetary Instances finest e book of 2023.

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Dr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions, Civilizational Know-how, and Discovering Your North Star


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Transcripts

SELECTED LINKS FROM THE EPISODE

  • Join with Dr. Fei-Fei Li:

World Labs | Stanford | Twitter | LinkedIn

Books & Articles

Establishments, Organizations, & Tradition

Folks

Universities, Colleges, & Instructional Packages

AI, Pc Science, & Information Ideas

Instruments, Platforms, Fashions, & Merchandise

Parenting, Sociology, & Tradition Ideas

Technical & Historic Objects

TIMESTAMPS

  • [00:00:00] Begin.
  • [00:01:22] Why it’s so outstanding that is our first time assembly.
  • [00:03:21] From a childhood in Chengdu to New Jersey
  • [00:04:51] Being raised by the alternative of tiger parenting.
  • [00:07:53] Why Dr. Li’s courageous dad and mom left all the pieces behind.
  • [00:11:17] Bob Sabella: The mathematics trainer who sacrificed lunch hours for an immigrant child.
  • [00:19:37] Seven years working a dry cleansing store by Princeton.
  • [00:20:50] How ImageNet birthed trendy AI.
  • [00:23:21] From fighter jets to physics to the audacious query: What’s intelligence?
  • [00:27:24] The epiphany everybody missed: Large knowledge because the hidden speculation.
  • [00:28:49] In opposition to the single-genius delusion: Science as non-linear lineage.
  • [00:32:18] Amazon Mechanical Turk: When desperation breeds innovation.
  • [00:39:03] High quality management puzzles: How do you cease folks from seeing pandas in every single place?
  • [00:41:36] The “Godmother of AI” on what everybody’s lacking: Folks.
  • [00:42:31] Civilizational expertise: AI’s fingerprints on GDP, tradition, and Japanese taxi screens.
  • [00:47:45] Pragmatic optimist: Why neither utopians nor doomsayers have it proper.
  • [00:51:30] Why World Labs: Spatial intelligence as the subsequent frontier past language.
  • [00:53:17] Packing sandwiches and portray bedrooms: Breaking down spatial reasoning.
  • [00:55:16] Medieval French cities on a finances: How World Labs serves highschool theater.
  • [00:59:08] Flight simulators for robots and strawberry subject remedy 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 schooling, and the messy center of labor.
  • [01:06:21] Hiring at World Labs: Why instrument embrace issues greater than levels.
  • [01:08:50] Rethinking analysis: Present college students AI’s B-minus, then problem them to beat it.
  • [01:11:24] Dr. Li’s Billboard.
  • [01:13:13] The fortuitous naming of Fei-Fei.
  • [01:14:46] Parting ideas.

DR. FEI-FEI LI QUOTES FROM THE INTERVIEW

“Actually, on the finish of the day, individuals are on the coronary heart of all the pieces. Folks made AI, folks will probably be utilizing AI, folks will probably be impacted by AI, and folks ought to have a say in AI.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“It turned out what physics taught me was not simply the maths and physics. It was actually this ardour to ask audacious questions.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“We’re all college students of historical past. One factor I really don’t like concerning the telling of scientific historical past is there’s an excessive amount of deal with single genius.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“AI is completely a civilizational expertise. I outline civilizational expertise within the sense that, due to the facility of this expertise, it’ll have—or [is] already having—a profound impression within the financial, social, cultural, political, downstream results of our society.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

“I imagine humanity is the one species that builds civilizations. Animals construct colonies or herds, however we construct civilizations, and we construct civilizations as a result of we need to be higher and higher.”
— Dr. Fei-Fei Li

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


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Need to hear one other podcast episode with somebody who helped construct the computational foundations of recent AI? Hearken to my dialog with legendary inventor Danny Hillis (and Wired founding govt editor Kevin Kelly), by which we mentioned pioneering parallel computing at MIT, learning synthetic intelligence below Marvin Minsky, constructing what consultants known as inconceivable, hiring Richard Feynman, working with Steve Jobs, 400+ patents, the excellence between “actual AI” and imitation intelligence, and far more.



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