Dr. Fei Fei Li
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is known as the “godmother of AI.” She’s been at the center of AI’s biggest breakthroughs for over two decades. She spearheaded ImageNet, the dataset that sparked the deep-learning revolution we’re living right now, served as Google Cloud’s Chief AI Scientist, directed Stanford’s Artificial Intelligence Lab, and co-founded Stanford’s Institute for Human-Centered AI.
AI & Technology Skills
Modern AI breakthroughs are built on the convergence of three core pillars: massive datasets, neural network architectures, and high-performance GPUs.
"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 ChatGPT moment, if..."
While scaling compute and data is effective, true progress toward advanced AI requires fundamental innovation in areas like abstraction, emotional intelligence, and scientific reasoning.
"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's not a single deepl..."
World models represent a shift from passive content generation to the creation of interactive, navigable, and reason-based 3D environments.
"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 an image or a sentence. And also be able to interact in..."
The 'Bitter Lesson' (scaling data/compute) is harder to apply to robotics because of the lack of high-quality 3D action data compared to the abundance of text for LLMs.
"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... why can't bitter lesson work in robotics alone? ...you hope to get ac..."
Career Skills
Successful career pivots often require a willingness to sacrifice short-term security (like tenure) for long-term impact and community alignment.
"I chose to come to Stanford because... I was okay to take a risk of restarting my tenure clock. Becoming the first female director of SAIL, I was actually relatively speaking a very young faculty at t..."
Communication Skills
For civilization-level technologies, alignment must extend beyond technical teams to include government, policy makers, and global regulatory bodies.
"I realized that Silicon Valley did not talk to Washington DC and or Brussels or other parts of the world. And given how important this technology is, we need to bring everybody on board. So we created..."
Hiring & Teams Skills
Intellectual fearlessness is a critical trait for talent in high-innovation fields where the path is unproven.
"I'm an intellectually very fearless person, and I have to say when I hire young people, I look for that because I think that's a very important quality if one wants to make a difference, is that when..."
Marketing Skills
Early product launches for horizontal AI technologies should focus on discovering unexpected high-value use cases through user experimentation.
"We're already seeing some really exciting use cases, virtual production for movies... robotic simulation... a psychologist team called us to use Marble to do psychology research. It turned out some of..."