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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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“Yeah, this is a very interesting term, Lenny. I don't know if anyone has ever defined AGI. You know, there are many different definitions, including some kind of superpower for machines all the way to machines can become economically viable agent in a society. In other words, making salaries to live, is that the definition of AGI? As a scientist, I take science very seriously and I enter the field because I was inspired by this audacious question of chemists think and do things in the way that humans can do. For me, that's always the North Star of AI. And from that point of view, I don't know what's the difference between AI and AGI. I think we've done very well in achieving parts of the goal, including conversational 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
“I think as all histories, you know, I'm keenly aware that I am recognized for being part of the history, but there are so many heroes and so many researchers. We're talking about generations of researchers that, you know, in my own world, there are so many people who have inspired me, which I talked about in my book. But I do feel our culture, especially Silicon Valley, tends to assign achievements to a single person while I think it has value, but it's just to be remembered. AI is a field of, at this point, 70 years old, and we have gone through many generations. Nobody, no one could have gotten here by themselves.”
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 was the changing. Like, some people start calling it AI. But I think if you look at the Silicon Valley tech companies, if you trace their marketing term, I think twenty seventeen ish was the beginning of companies calling themselves AI companies.”
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 think that was interchangeably. It's true. Like, I do remember the companies, the tech companies, Anogland named names, but I was in a conversation in one of the early days, I think, is in the middle of 2015, middle of 2016, some tech companies avoids using the word AI because they were not sure if AI was a dirty word. And I remember I was actually encouraging everybody to use the word AI because to me that is one of the most audacious question humanity has ever asked in our quest for science and technology. And I feel very proud of this term. But yes, at the beginning, some people were not sure.”
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, yeah, I remember Alex Wong from Scale very early days. He probably still has his emails when he was starting scale. He was very kind. He keeps sending me emails about how image that inspired scale. I was very pleased to see 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
“The image that big data and two GPUs from NVIDIA and created successfully the first neural network algorithm that can, it did a fundamental, it didn't totally solve but made a huge progress towards solving the problem of object recognition. And that combination of the trio technology, big data, neural network and GPU was kind of the golden recipe for modern AI. And then fast forward the public moment of AI, which is the chat GPT moment, if you look at the ingredients of what brought ChatGPT to the world, technically is still used these three ingredients. Now it's internet scale. Data are mostly texts is a much more complex neural network architecture than 2012, but it's still neural network and a lot more GPUs, but it's still GPUs. So these three ingredients are still at the core of modern 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
“And that's what we did. We curated very carefully 15 million images on the internet, created a taxonomy of 22,000 concepts borrowing other researchers' work like linguists' work on WordNet. And it's a particular way of dictionary words. And we combine that into image that and we open source that to the research community. We held an annual image that challenged to encourage everybody to participate in this. We continue to do our own research. But 2012 was the moment that many people think was the beginning of the deep learning or birth of modern AI because a group of Toronto researchers led by Professor Jeff Hinton participated in Image That Challenge.”
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
“As well as evolution is actually a big data learning process. Humans learn with so much experience constantly and evolution if you look at time animals evolve with just experiencing the world. So I think my students and I conjectured that very critically overlooked ingredient of bringing AI to life is big data. And then we began this ImageDAP project in 2006-2007. We were very ambitious. We want to get the entire internet's image data on objects. Now granted internet was a lot smaller than today. So I felt like that ambition was at least not too crazy. Now it's totally delusional to think a couple of grander students and the professor can do this.”
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
“As a student of AI and a researcher of AI, I was working on all kinds of mathematical models, including neural network, including Bayesian network, including many, many models, and there was one singular pain point, is that these models don't have data to be trained on. And as a field, we were so focusing on these models, but it dawned on me that human learning”
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
“My students and I are very committed to a North Star problem which is solving the problem of object recognition because it's a building block for the perceptual world, right? We go around the world interpreting reasoning and interacting with it more or less at the object level. We don't interact with the world at the molecular level. We don't interact with the world as we sometimes do, but we rarely, for example, if you want to lift a teapa, you don't say, okay, the teapot is made of 100 pieces of porcelain and let me work at least 100 pieces. You look at this as one object and interact with it. So object is really important. So I was among the first researchers to identify this as a North Star problem. But I think what happened 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
“I literally in the year of 2000. That's when my PhD began at Caltech. And so I was one of the first generation machine learning researchers. We were already studying this concept of machine learning, especially neural network. I remember that was one of my first courses in ACOTEC. It's called Neural Network. But it was very painful. It was still smack in the middle of the so-called AI winter, meaning the public didn't look at this too much. There wasn't that much funding. But there was also a lot of ideas flowing around. And I think two things happened to myself that brought my own career so close to the birth of modern AI is that I chose to look at artificial intelligence through the lens of visual intelligence because humans are deeply Visual animals, we can talk a little more later, but so much of our intelligence is built”
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
“Purely rule based program is not going to account for the vast amount of cognitive capabilities that we imagine computers can do. So we have to use machines to learn the patterns. Once the machines can learn the patterns, it has a hope to do more things. For example, if you give it three cats, the hope is not just for the machines to recognize these three cats. The hope is the machines can recognize the fourth cat, the fifth cat, the sixth cat, and all the other cats. And that's a learning ability that is fundamental to humans and many animals. And we as a field realize we need machine learning. So that was up till the beginning of the 21st century. I entered the field of A.”
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
“In the 1956, you know, we have Professor John McCarthy, who later came to Stafford, who coined the term artificial intelligence. And between the 50s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, it was the early days of AI exploration, and we had logic systems, we had expert systems, we also had early exploration of neural network. And then it came to around the late 80s, the 90s, and the very beginning of the 21st century. That stretch about 20 years is actually the beginning of machine learning. It's the marriage between computer programming and statistical learning. And that marriage brought a very, very critical concept into AI, which 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
“Ahead of his time, in the 40s, by asking daring humanity with the question, is there thinking machines? And of course, he has a specific way of testing this concept of thinking machine, which is a conversational chatbot, which to his standard, we now have a thinking machine. But that was just a more anecdotal inspiration. The field really began in the 50s when computer scientists came together and looked at how we can use computer programs. And algorithms to build these programs that can do things that have been only capable by human cognition. And that was the beginning and the founding fathers, the Dartmouth 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
“It is for me hard to keep in mind that AI is so new for everybody when I lived my entire professional life in AI. A part of me that is just, it's so satisfying to see a personal curiosity that I started barely out of teenagehood and now has become a transformative force of our civilization. It generally is a civilizational level technology. So that journey is about 30 years or 20 something, 20 plus years. And it's just very satisfying. So where did it all start? Well, I'm not even the first generation AI researcher. The first generation really date back to the 50s and 60s. And, you know, Alan Turing was”
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 think people should be responsible individuals no matter what we do. This is what we teach our children and this is what we need to do as grownups as well, no matter which part of the AI development or AI deployment or AI application you are participating in and most likely many of us, especially as technologists, we're in multiple points, we should act like responsible individuals and care about this actually care a lot about this. I think everybody today should care about AI because it is going to impact your individual life. It is going to impact your community. It's going to impact the society and the future generation and caring about it as a responsible person is the first but also the most Most important step.”
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 feel pretty deeply. I started working AI two and a half decades ago and I've been having students for the past two decades. And almost every student who graduates, I remind them, when they graduate from my lab that your field is called artificial intelligence, but there's nothing artificial about 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
“Is part of that. So that's where the optimism comes from. But I think every technology is a double-edged sword. And if we're not doing the right thing as a species, as a society, as communities, as individuals, we can screw this up as well.”
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
“Okay, so let me be very clear I'm not a utopian so it's not like I think AI will have no impact on jobs or people. In fact, I'm a humanist. I believe that whatever AI does currently or in the future is up to us. It's up to the people. So I do believe technology is a net positive for humanity if you look at the long course of civilization. I think we are a fundamentally we're an innovative species that we you know if you look at from written record thousands of years ago to now humans just kept innovating ourselves and innovating our tools and with that we make lives better we make work better we build civilization and i do believe”
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 chose to look at artificial intelligence through the lens of visual intelligence because humans are deeply visual animals. We need to train machines with as much information as possible on images of objects. But objects are very, very difficult to learn. A single object can have infinite possibilities that is shown on an image. In order to train computers with tens and thousands of object concepts, you really need to show it millions of examples.”
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 not like I think AI will have no impact on jobs or people. In fact, I believe that whatever AI does currently or in the future is up to us. It's up to the people. I do believe technology is a net positive for humanity, but I think every technology is a double-edged sword. If we're not doing the right thing as a society, as individuals, we can screw this up as well.”
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
“In the middle of 2015, middle of 2016, some tech companies avoid using the word AI because they were not sure if AI was a dirty word. 2017-ish was the beginning of companies calling themselves AI companies”
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