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Dr. Fei-Fei Li

lines on the record: 72
first: 2025-11-16
most recent: 2025-11-16
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Well, Rollab's website is www.l.wurlabs.ai and you can find our research progress there. We have technical blogs. You can find Marvel the product there. You can sign in there. You can find our job posts link there. We're in San Francisco. We love to work with the world's best talents”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you're a farmer near retirement, AI still matters because you're a citizen, you can participate in your community. You should have a voice in how AI is used, how AI is applied. You work with people that you can encourage all of you to use AI to make life easier for you. If you're a nurse, I hope you know that at least in my career, I have worked so much in healthcare research because I feel our healthcare workers should be greatly augmented and helped by AI technology, whether it's smart cameras to feed more information or robotic assistance. Over fatigued, and as our society ages, we need more help for people to be taken care of. So AI can play that role. So I just want to say that it's so important that even a technologist like me are sincere about that everybody has a role in AI.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Embrace AI as a tool. In fact, embrace marble. I hope it becomes a tool for you. Because the way you tell your story is unique and the world still needs it. But how you tell your story, how do you use the most incredible tool to tell your story in the most unique way is important. And that voice needs to be heard.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With people like us and not like us in Silicon Valley, but like all of us, we tend to just toss around words like infinite productivity or infinite leisure time or infinite power or whatever. But at the end of the day, AI is about people. And when people ask me that question, it's a resounding yes. Everybody has a role in AI. It depends on what you do and what you want, but no technology should take away human dignity. And the human dignity and agency should be at the heart of the development, the deployment, as well as the governance of every technology. So if you are a young artist, Your passion is storytelling”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very excited by AI Lenny. I want to answer one question that when I travel around the world, everybody asks me, is that if I'm a musician, if I'm a teacher, middle school teacher, if I'm a nurse, if I'm an accountant, if I'm a farmer, do I have a role in AI or is AI just going to take over my life or my work? And I think this is the most important question of AI. And I find that in Silicon Valley, we tend not.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Washington, DC, or Brussels, or other parts of the world. And it's given how important this technology is, we need to bring everybody on board. So we created multiple programs from congressional bootcamp to AI index report to policy briefing and we especially participated in policy making including advocating for a national AI research cloud bill that was passed in the first Trump administration and participating in state level regulatory AI discussions. So there's a lot we did and I continue to be one of the leaders even though I'm much less involved. Of the operationally, because I care not only we create this technology, but we use it in the right way.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Ecosystem outreach and policy impact. It involves hundreds of faculty across all eight schools at Stanford from medicine to education to sustainability to business to engineering to humanities to law and we support researchers, especially at the interdisciplinary area from digital economy to legal studies to political science to discovery of new drugs to new algorithms that's beyond transformers. We also actually put a very strong focus on policy because when we started HAI, I realized that Silicon Valley did not talk to us.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To apply AI, and that framework has to be anchored in human benevolence, is human centeredness. And I felt that Stanford, one of the world's top university in the heart of Silicon Valley that gave birth to important companies from NVIDIA to Google should be a thought leader to create this human-centered AI framework and to actually embody that in our research, education, and policy and ecosystem work. So I founded HAI, it, you know, after fast forward, after six, seven years, it has become the world's largest AI institute that does human-centered research education.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, yes, human-centered AI Institute was co-founded by me and a group of faculty like Professor John Edgemendi, Professor James Landy, Professor Chris Manning back in 2018. I was actually finishing my last sabbatical at Google. It was a very, very important decision for me because I could have stayed in industry, but my time at Google taught me one thing is AI is going to be a civilizational technology. It dawned on me how important this is to humanity to the point that I actually wrote a piece in New York Times that year, 2018, to talk about the need for a guiding framework to develop and to”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When maybe the most important thing is where's your passion? Do you align with the mission? Do you believe and have faith in this team? And just focus on the impact and you can make and the kind of work and team you can work with.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I do want to say one thing to all the young talents in AI, the engineers, the researchers out there, because some of you apply to World Labs. I feel very privileged you considered World Labs. I do find many of the young people today think about every single world. Aspect of an equation when they decide on jobs. At some point, maybe, you know, maybe that's the way they want to do it, but sometimes I do want to encourage young people to focus on what's important because I find myself constantly in mentoring mode when I talk to job candidates, not necessarily recruiting or not recruiting, but just in mentoring mode when I see an incredible young talent who is over focusing on every minute dimension and aspect of considering a job.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“With people like Jeff Dean, Jeff Hinton, and all these incredible demos, the incredible people. So the same with World Labs, I have this passion and I also believe that people with the same mission can do incredible things. So that's how it guided through like I don't overthink of all possible things that can go wrong because that's too many.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Chose to come just ever because I love Princeton, it's where alma mater. It's just at that moment there are people who are so amazing at Stanford and the Silicon Valley ecosystem was so amazing that I was okay to take a risk of restarting my tenure clock. Going to becoming the first female director of sale, I was actually, relatively speaking, a very young faculty at that time. And I wanted to do that because I care about that community. I didn't spend too much time thinking about all the failure cases. Obviously, I was very lucky that the more senior faculty supported me, but I just wanted to make a difference. And then going to Google was similar. I wanted to work.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have that self awareness, you almost have to allow yourself to be fearless and to be courageous. So when I, for example, came to Stanford, you know, in the world of academia, I was very close to this thing called tenure, which is have the job forever at Princeton”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is actually a great question, Lenny, because I do think about it. Obviously, we talked about its curiosity and passion that brought me to AI. That is more a scientific North Star, right? I did not carry if AI was a thing or not. So that was one part. But how did I end up choosing in the particular places I work in, including starting World Labs I think I'm very grateful to myself or maybe to my parents Jean's I'm an intellectually very fearless person. And I have to say when I hire young people, I look for that because I, um... I think that's a very important quality if one wants to make a difference is that when you want to make a difference, you have to accept that you're creating something new or you're diving into something new. People haven't done that. And if you”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then I, you know, founded Google Cloud AI and then I founded an institute at Stanford, but those are different beasts. I did feel I was a little more prepared of the grinding journey that I compared to maybe the 20-year-old founders, but I still I'm surprised and it puts me into paranoia sometimes that how intensely competitive AI landscape is from From the model, the technology itself, as well as talents. And, you know, when I founded the company, we did not have these incredible stories of how much certain talents would cost. So these are things that continue to surprise me. And I have to be very alert about.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, I continue to wish I know. The future of technology. I think actually that's one of our founding advantages is that we see the future earlier in general than most people, but still, man, this is so exciting and so amazing that what's unknown and what's coming. But I know the reason you're asking me this question is a lot about the future of technology. You're probably more, you know, look, I did not start a company of this scale. At twenty year old. So, you know, I started a dry cleaner when I was 19, but that's a little smaller scale.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It takes a lot of brain power, so we just talk about twenty watts per brain. So from that point of view, it's a small number, but it's actually an incredible, you know, it's half billion years of evolution to give us those power. We have a team of 30 ish people now and we are predominantly researchers and research engineers. But we also have designers and product. We actually really believe that we want to create a company that's anchored in the deep tech of spatial intelligence, but we are actually building serious products so we have this integration of R&D and productization. And of course we use a ton of GPUs.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By the way, we could in marble, we could allow people to export in video form. So you could actually, like you said, you go into a world. So let's say it's a hobbit cave. You can actually, especially as a creator, you have such a specific way of moving the camera in a trajectory in the director's mind, right? And then you can export that from Marble into a video.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“real time demo real-time video generation on a single h100 GPU. So part of our technology includes that. But I think Marble is very different because we really want creators, designers, developers to have in their hands a model that can give them worlds with 3D structure so they can use it for their work and that's where that's why Marble is so different.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Extreme example, but it really shows, it describes what vision is about is that to make sense of the 3D world or 4D world out of 2D. So spatial intelligence to me is deeper than only creating that flat 2D world. Spatial intelligence to me is the ability to create reason, interact, make sense of deeply spatial world, whether it's 2D or 3D or 4D, including dynamics and all that. So World Lab is focusing on that. And of course, the ability to create videos per se could be part of this. And in fact, just a couple of weeks ago, we rolled out the world's first.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Worlap's thesis is that spatial intelligence is fundamentally very important and spatial intelligence is not just up. It's not just about videos. In fact, the world is not passively watching videos passing by, right? I love Plato has the allegory of the cave analogy to describe vision. He said that imagine a prisoner tied on his chair, not very humane, but in a cave watching a full life theater in front of him. But the actual life theater that actors are acting is behind his back. It was just lit so that the projection of the action is on a wall of the cave. And then the goal, the task of this prisoner is to figure out what's going on. It's a pretty...”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing. A friend of mine last night literally called me and talked about his height scare and asked me if marble should be used. It's amazing you went straight there.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of how they want to use marble. For example, a psychologist team called us to use marble to do psychology research. It turned out some of the psychiatric patients they study, they need to understand how their brain respond to different immersive things of different features. For example, messy things or clean things or whatever you name it. And it's very hard for researchers to get their hands on these kind of immersive things. And it will take them too long and too much budget to create. And Marble is a really almost instantaneous way of getting so many of these experimental environments into their hands. So we're seeing Seen multiple use cases at this point, but the VFX, the game developers, the simulation developers, as well as designers are very excited.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We were showing an example of robotic simulation because when I was, I mean, I still am a researcher doing robotic training, one of the biggest pain point is to create synthetic data for training robots. And this synthetic data needs to be very diverse. They need to come from different environments with different objects to manipulate. And one path to it is to ask computers to simulate. Otherwise, humans have to build every single asset for robots. That's just going to take a lot longer. So we already have researchers reaching out and wanting to use marble to create those synthetic environments. We also have unexpected user outreach in terms of”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time by 40x. In fact, it has 40x. Yes. In fact, it has to because we only had one month to work on this project. And there were so many things they were trying to shoot. So using marble really, really significantly accelerated the production of virtual production for VFX and movies. That's one use case. We are already seeing our users taking our marble scene and taking the mesh export and putting games, you know, whether it's games on VR or games just fun games that they have developed. We have had”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so we do believe that world modeling is very horizontal, but we're already seeing some really exciting use cases, virtual production for movies, because what they need are 3D worlds that they can align with the camera. So when the actors are acting on it, they can position the camera and shoot the segments really well. And we're already seeing incredible use. In fact, I don't know if you have seen our launch video showing marble. It was produced by a virtual production company. We collaborated with Sony. And they use Marble things to shoot those videos. So we were collaborating with those technical artists and directors, and they were saying this has cut our production.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That is so cool to hear. Because this is where, as a researcher, I'm learning because the dots that lead you into the world was an intentional feature visualization is not part of the model. The model actually just generates the world. We were trying to find a way to guide people into the world and a number of engineers worked on different versions, but we converged on the DA. And so many people, you're not the only one, told us how delightful that experience is. And it was really satisfying for us to hear that this intentional visualization feature, that's not just the big hardcore model actually has delighted our users.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which we have an option to let you do that, you can even walk around, right? So it was, even though we've been building this for quite a while, it was still just all inspiring. And we wanted to get into the hands of people who need it. And then we know that so many creators, designers, people who are thinking about robotic simulation, people who are thinking about different use cases of navigable interactable immersive worlds, game developers will find this useful. as a first step it's it's again still very early but it's the world's first model doing this and it's the world's first product that allows people to just prompt we call it prompt to Worlds.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Marvel is an app that's built upon our frontier models. We've spent a year in plus building the world's first generative model that can output genuinely 3D worlds. That's a very, very hard problem. It was a very hard process. We have a team of incredible founding team of incredible technologists from incredible teams. And then around just a month or two ago, we saw the first time that we can just prompt with a sentence and an image and multiple images and create worlds that we can just navigate in. If you put it on goggle.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm very excited. So, first of all, Marbo is one of the first products that Worlabs has rolled out. WorldLabs is a frontier model company. We are funded by four co-founders who have deep technical history. My co-founders, Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, we all come from the research field of AI, computer graphics, computer vision. And we believe that spatial intelligence and world modeling is as important, if not more, to language models and complementary to language models. So we wanted to seize this opportunity to create deep tech research lab that can connect the dots between frontier models with products.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Totally. We operate on about 20 watts. That's dimmer than any light bulb in the room I'm in right now. And yet we can do so much. So I think actually the more I work in AI, the more I respect humans.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Touch anything. Robot is 3D things running in 3D world and the goal is to touch things. So the journey is going to be, you know, there's many aspects, elements. And of course, one could say, well, the self-driving car early algorithm were pre-deep learning era. So deep learning is accelerating the brains. And I think that's true. That's why I mean robotics. That's why I mean spatial intelligence and I'm excited by it. But in the meantime, the car industry is very mature. And productizing also involves the mature use cases, supply chains, the hardware. So I think it's a very interesting time to work in these problems. But it's true Bennett's right. We might still be subject to A number of bitter lessons.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So realistic about is again compared to language models or even spatial models, robots are physical assistants. So robots are closer to self-driving cars than a large language model. And that's very important to recognize. We not only need brings, we also need the physical body, we also need application scenarios. If you look at the history of self-driving car, my colleague Sebastian Thrum took Stanford's car to win the first DARPA challenge in 2006 or 2005. It's 20 years since that prototype of a self-driving car being able to drive 130 miles in the Nevada desert to today's Waymo and on the street of San Francisco. And we're not even done yet. There's still a lot. So that's a 20-year journey. And self-driving cars are much simpler robots. They're just metal boxes running on 2D surfaces and the goal is not to”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But your training data lacks actions in 3D worlds. And that's what robots have to do, right? Actions in 3D worlds. So you have to find different ways to fit, what do they call a square in a round hole? What we have is tons of web videos. So there we have to start talking about adding, supplementing data such as teleoperation data or synthetic data so that the robots are trained with this hypothesis of bitter lesson, which is large amount of data. I think there's still hope because even when we are doing in world modeling, we'll really unlock a lot of this information for robots. But I think we have to be careful because we're at the early days of this and bitter lesson is still to be tested because we haven't fully figured out the data for. Another part of the bitter lesson of robotics I think we should be so”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's harder to get data. It's a lot harder to get data. You can say, well, there is web data. This is where the latest robotics research is using web videos. And I think web videos do play a role. But if you think about what made language model work, as someone who does computer vision and spatial intelligence and robotics, I'm very jealous of my colleagues in language because they had this perfect setup where their training data are in words, eventually tokens. And then they produce a model that outputs words. So you have this perfect alignment between what you hope to get, which we call objective function and what your training data looks like. But robotics is different. Even spatial intelligence is different. You hope to get actions out of robots.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Experimentation. It's not the research is not nearly as mature as, say, language models. So many people are still experimenting with different algorithms and some of those algorithms are driven by big data. So I do think big data will continue to play a role in robotics. But what is hard for robotics, there are a couple of things. One is that”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So first of all there are many bitter lessons but the bitter lessons everybody refers to is a paper written by Richard Sutton who won the Turing Award recently and he does a lot of reinforcement learning and Richard has said right if you look at the history especially the algorithmic development of AI it turns out simpler model with a ton of data always win at the end of the day instead of the more complex model with less data. I mean that was actually this paper came years after ImageNet that to me was not bitter it was a sweet lesson that's why I built ImageNet because I believe that big data plays that role so why can bitter lesson work in robotics Well, first of all, I think we need to give credit to where we are today. Robotics is very much in the early days of”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And also design Humans design from machines to buildings to homes, and also scientific discovery. There is so much, I like to use the example of the discovery of the structure of DNA. If you look at one of the most important piece in DNA, It looks like a cross with diffractions. You can Google those photos. But with that 2D flack photo, humans, especially two important humans, James Watson and Francis Crick, in addition to their other information, was able to reason in 3D space and deduce a highly 3D dimensional double helix structure of the DNA. And that structure cannot possibly be 2D. You cannot think in 2D and deduce that structure. You have to think in 3D spatial use, the human spatial intelligence. So I think even in scientific discovery, spatial intelligence or AI assisted, spatial intelligence is critical.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, well, first of all, I do think there is more that robots that's exciting. But I agree with everything you just said. I think world modeling and spatial intelligence is a key missing piece of embody AI. I also think let's not underestimate that humans are embodied agents and humans can be augmented by AI's intelligence. Just like today, humans are language animals, but we're very much augmented by AI in helping us to do language tasks, including software engineering. I think that we shouldn't underestimate or maybe it's we tend not to talk about how humans as an embodied agent can actually benefit so much from world models and spatial intelligence models. As well as robots.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's part of it, Lenny. I think a simple way to understand a world model is that this model can allow anyone to create Any worlds in their mind's eye by prompting, whether it's image or sentence, and also be able to interact in this world, whether you're browsing and walking or picking objects up or changing things, as well as to reason within this world. For example, if the person consuming, if the agent consuming this output of the world model is a robot, it should be able to plan its path and help to tidy the kitchen, for example. So world model is a Foundation that you can use to reason, to interact and to create worlds.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The additional intelligence in addition to language and connecting embodied AI, which are robotics, connecting visual intelligence is the sense of spatial intelligence about understanding the world. And that's when I think it was 2024 I gave a TED talk about spatial intelligence and world models and I start formulating this idea back in 2022 based on my robotics and computer vision research. And then one thing that was really clear to me is that I really want to work with the brightest technologists and move as fast as possible to bring this technology to life. And that's when we founded this company called World Labs. Can see the word world is in the title of our company because we believe so much in world modeling and spatial intelligence.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Humans have used our sense of spatial intelligence and world understanding to do so many things, and they are beyond language. Think about a very chaotic first responder scene, whether it's fire or some traffic accident or some natural disaster. And if you immerse yourself in those scene and think about how people organize themselves to rescue people, to stop further disasters, to put down fires, to a lot of that is movement is spontaneous understanding of objects, worlds, situational awareness. Language is part of that, but a lot of those situations cannot get to To put on the fire, so that is what is that? I was thinking a lot. And in the meantime, I was doing a lot of robotics research. And it dawned on me that the linchpin of connecting”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Conversations with my natural language processing colleagues like Percy Lang and Chris Madding, we were talking about how critical this technology is going to be. And Stanford AI Institute, Human Center AI Institute, HAI was the first one to establish a full research center on foundation model. We were Persi Liang and many researchers led the first academic paper on foundation models. So it was just very inspiring for me. So of course I come from the world of visual intelligence and I was just thinking there's so much we can push forward beyond language because humans”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm very excited to see that more and more people are talking about role models like Elon, like Jensen. I have been thinking about really how to push AI forward all my life. And the large language models that came out of the research world and then OpenAI and all this for the past few years were extremely inspiring, even for a researcher like me. I remembered when GPT-2 came out, and that was in I think late 2020 I was co-director, I still am, but I was at that time full-time co-director of Stanford's Human Center AI Institute. And I remember it was, you know, the public was not aware of the power of the large language model yet, but as researchers, we were seeing it. We're seeing the future. And I had pretty long.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, we're not. In fact, it's even worse. Let's give AI all the data, including modern instruments data of celestial bodies, which Newton did not have. Give it to that and just ask AI to create the 17th century set of equations on the laws of bodily movements. Today's AI cannot do that.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What to learn? What's the problem that's really bothering you? That conversation, as powerful as today's conversational bots are, you don't get that level of emotion cognitive intelligence from today's AI. So there's a lot we can do better. And I do not believe we're done innovating.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The model to count the number of chairs. And this is something a toddler could do, or maybe an elementary school kid could do. And AI could not do that, right? So there's just so much AI today could not do. Then let alone thinking about how did someone like Isaac Newton look at the movements of the celestial bodies and derive an equation or a set of equations that governs the movement of all bodies, that level of creativity extrapolation abstraction, we have no way of enabling AI to do that today. And then let's look at emotional intelligence. If you look at a student coming to a teacher's office and have a conversation about motivation, passion.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, I definitely think we need more innovations. I think scaling loss of more data, more GPUs and bigger current model architecture is there's still a lot to be done there. But I absolutely think we need to innovate more. There is not a single deeply scientific discipline in human history that has arrived at a place that says we're done, we're done innovating. And AI is one of the, if not the youngest discipline in human civilization in terms of science and technology, we're still scratching the surface. For example, like I said, we're going to segue into world models. Today you take a model and run it through a video of a couple of office rooms and ask the”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Don't think we have completely conquered all the goals of AI. And I think our founding fathers, Alan Turi, I wonder if Alan Turing is around today and you ask him to contrast AI versus AGI, he might just shrug and said, well, I asked the same question back in 1940s. So I don't want to get onto a rabbit hole of defining AI versus AGI. I feel AGI is more a marketing term than a scientific term. As a scientist than technologist, AI is my North Star, is my field's North Star, and I'm happy people call it whatever name they want to call it.”
2025-11-16 · Lenny's Podcast · The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source