Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li was born in China and immigrated to the United States, where she drew early resilience from helping run her family's dry-cleaning business, skills that later informed her problem-solving in AI. She earned her academic credentials leading to a faculty position at Stanford University, where she became director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) from 2013 to 2018 and Sequoia Capital professor of computer science. Her research emphasizes computer vision, deep learning, and cognitive neuroscience, resulting in over 300 peer-reviewed publications. In 2007, while briefly at Princeton, Li spearheaded ImageNet, a massive database of over 14 million labeled images crowdsourced via Amazon Mechanical Turk, addressing a critical data bottleneck in AI object recognition. This project birthed the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), catalyzing dramatic improvements in image classification and underpinning technologies like autonomous vehicles and medical imaging. She later co-founded Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute with John Etchemendy, promoting AI that benefits humanity through research, education, policy, and practice. From 2017 to 2018, on sabbatical from Stanford, Li served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML and Vice President at Google Cloud, where her team developed tools like AutoML to democratize AI for businesses and developers. She previously sat on Twitter's board. In recent years, Li founded World Labs, a startup valued over $1 billion within its first year, launching products like the Marble platform for generating 3D environments from prompts to advance 'spatial intelligence'—AI's ability to model and interact with physical worlds beyond language.