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

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. 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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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.

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