Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li (born 1976 in Beijing) immigrated to the United States as a teenager, studied physics at Princeton, and became one of the most consequential figures in modern computer science. Her ImageNet project — a database of millions of labeled images launched in 2009 — provided the fuel for the 2012 deep-learning breakthrough that ignited the current AI era, which is why the press calls her the “godmother of AI.”

Human-centered, and firmly pro

Li served as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud from 2017 to 2018, then returned to Stanford to co-found the Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI) in 2019. Testifying before Congress in 2018, she argued there is “nothing artificial” about AI — it is made by people and impacts people — a framing that has defined her career-long insistence that the technology be steered rather than feared. Her 2023 memoir The Worlds I See doubles as an argument for keeping humans at the center of the field she helped build.

Far from slowing down, Li went deeper: in 2024 she founded World Labs, a startup pursuing “spatial intelligence” — AI that can generate and reason about 3D worlds — which raised funding at a multibillion-dollar valuation. “The world is 3D. We don’t live in a flat world,” she told IEEE Spectrum in 2024, describing spatial intelligence as the next frontier after language.

Li is no uncritical booster — she has warned that frontier-scale compute is beyond what universities and the public sector can afford, and pushed for public investment so AI research is not monopolized by a few companies. But her answer to AI anxiety is agency and education, not restriction: in 2026 she launched a MasterClass course to teach the public how AI actually works.