118. “My God, This Is a Transformative Power”

Computer scientist Fei-Fei Li had a wild idea: download one billion images from the internet and teach a computer to recognize them. She ended up advancing the state of artificial intelligence — and she hopes that will turn out to be a good thing for humanity. 

RESOURCES:

• The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of A.I., by Fei-Fei Li (2023).
• "Fei-Fei Li's Quest to Make AI Better for Humanity," by Jessi Hempel (Wired, 2018).
• "ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge," by Olga Russakovsky, Li Fei-Fei, et al. (International Journal of Computer Vision, 2015).

EXTRAS:

• “How to Think About A.I." series by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
• “Will A.I. Make Us Smarter?” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2023).
• “Satya Nadella’s Intelligence Is Not Artificial,” by Freakonomics Radio (2023).
• “Max Tegmark on Why Superhuman Artificial Intelligence Won’t be Our Slave,” by People I (Mostly) Admire (2021).

SOURCES:

• Fei-Fei Li, professor of computer science and co-director of the Human-Centered A.I. Institute at Stanford University.