Fei-Fei Li Helped Create AI, Now She Feels the Responsibility

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I was always a curious kid. I wasn't curious about nightclubs or her or other things. I was an avid lover of science.

Faith a Lee Tech CEO, Stanford professor and godmother of AI. Are you conscious of the power that you have?

I'm conscious of my responsibility. I understand. I'm one of the people who brought this technology to our world. The agency is not the machines, It's ours.

From Bloomberg Weekend. This is the Michelle Hussein Show. I'm Michelle Hussein. Have you ever thought about where AI came from? The origin story of tools like Chat, GPT, Claude, or Gemini, which are part of many people's everyday lives. I don't mean the principle of training large language models on data, but the long, often lonely work of the scientists who

We ended up.

Talking about everything from her own childhood to yes, whether AI will do away with us humans, and what we should teach the kids of today. Her answer on that might just surprise you, but I hope you enjoy our conversation as much as I did. Doctor fay fe Lee, thank you for coming on the show. I'd love to start with this remarkable period for your industry. It's three years since chat GPT was released to the public, and since then there have been new vehicles, new apps, huge

Well, first of all, Michelle, thank you for inviting me to this show. I'm very excited. It's a good question because AI is not new to me. I've been in this field for twenty five years. I live and breathe it every day since the beginning of my career. Yet this moment is still as daunting and almost surreal to

When was the moment it changed? Because I know you've talked about the years when it was like an AI winter and what you're describing now, how the moment feels extraordinary even to you. Is it because of the pace of developments or is it because the world has woken up to it and therefore turned the spotlight on people like you.

I think it's intertwined, right, But for me to define this as a civilizational technology is not about spotlight. It's not even about how powerful it is, is about how many people it impacts. Everyone's life work, while being future will somehow be touched by or impacted by AI.

In bad ways as well as good.

What technology is a dubba sword?

Right?

Yes? I think both ways, Because since the dawn of human civilization, we create tools we call technologies and these tools are meant in general for doing good things, but along the way we might intentionally use it in the wrong way, or we might have unintended consequences.

And strands of this I know will emerge in different ways over the course of this conversation. But you said the word power, and I'm struck by the fact that the power of this technology is in the hands of a very small number of companies, most of them American. How does that sit with you?

You're right, the major tech companies, through their massively reaching products, they are impacting globally our society the most. I would personally like to see this technology being much more democratized. I would like to see no matter who builds or holds the profound impact of this technology, do it in a responsible way. And I also do believe every individual in this era should feel they have the agency to impact this technology.

We'll talk a bit more in a moment. I think about the democratization and how that might be achieved. But you,

Yes, co founder CEO of war Laps, and we are building the next frontier of AI, which is spatial intelligence, which people don't hear too much about today because we're all about large language models. Yet I believe spatial intelligence is as critical and complimentary to language intelligence.

Releasing this idea of virtual world, which again we'll dig into. But before we do that, I want you to take us back again to the fact that you've seen the whole trajectory of this industry. You've been in it for twenty five years. I know that your first academic love was physics. Yes, what was it in the life or work of the physicists you most admire that made you think beyond that particular field.

I grew up in a it's not a small town,

But your audacious question, I think, was about what is intelligence?

Yes, And I think it's rooted in my love for physics and my training in physics that I look at each physicist I admire, look at their audacious question, right from Newton to Maxwell, to Schrodinger to i Instell, my favorite physicist, and I wanted to find my own audacious question. And somewhere in the middle of college, my audacious question shifted from physical matters to intelligence.

What is it?

How does it come about? And most fascinatingly, how do

And that's quantumly because from machines that were doing calculations and computations, you're really talking about machines that learn and that are constantly learning.

I like you use the physics pun the quantum leap.

Crossing over into into ordinary parlance. But I think, didn't you have this light bulb moment as you're thinking about intelligence you realize that a critical part of that is our ability to recognize objects. The fact that around us right now there are multiple objects, we know what they are.

The ability that humans have about recognizing objects in the world is foundational. So I decided that was my first love start my PhD dissertation is to build machine algorithms to recognize as meaning objects as possible.

I think the key question is how right how do you teach the machines? And what I found really interesting about your background is that you are reading very widely

Well, that's the beauty of doing science at the forefront, because it's you. No one knows how to do it. As an AI scientist, you look for possible answers, and it's pretty natural to look at human brain and human mind and try to understand or be inspired by what humans can do. And one of the inspirations I got in my early days of studying or trying to unlock this visual intelligence problem is look at how our visual semantic space is structured. There are so many tens and

And you're asking that because you have to understand how our brains organize in order to have something to teach the computers.

That's one way to think about it. And I come upon this linguistic work call word net word that is a way to organize semantic concepts, not visual, just semantic or words in a particular taxonomy.

Give me an example.

An example is in a dictionary, an apple and an appliance are very close together, but in real life, an apple and a pair a much closer to each other, and an apple and pair both belong to fruits, whereas an appliance belong to a whole different family of objects and I came upon this taxonomy called word net that describes this organization of objects, and I made a connection in my head. Is that two things is very clear.

Hence the big data sets needed. And actually it's worth noting that at that time, I think this is early part of the century, the idea of big data two thousand and six exists.

No big data was not this phrase did not even exist. The kind of scientific data sets we were playing with were tiny. For example, in images, most of the graduate students in my era were playing with data sets of four or six or at most twenty object classes each class there were a couple of hundred examples and most and that's how tiny it is. Whereas fast forward three years later, after we created image that it had twenty two thousand classes of objects and fifteen million annotated image.

And image net was a huge breakthrough. It's the reason that you've been called the godmother of AI. I'd love to understand more about what it is about you that enabled you to make these connections and see things that other scientists didn't. And one that immediately comes to mind is that you acquired English as a second language after you moved to the United States. Is there something in that that led to what you're describing.

Michelle, that's a great question. I've been asked this question, and my true answers I don't know. Human creativity is still such a mystery. People talk about AI doing everything, and I disagree. There's so much about the mystery of human mind that we don't know. So I can only conjecture that a combination of my interest and my experiences led to this, including the curiosity and the hunger for

What was it like coming to the United States as a teenager, because I think that's a particularly difficult stage

That was hard, I think being an immigrant. And I came to this country when I was fifteen in New Jersey. Parcipitately, in New Jersey, none of us, my parents nor I spoke much English at all. I was young enough to learn more quickly. It was very hard for my parents, and we were not financially very well at all. My parents were doing cashier jobs and I was doing Chinese restaurant jobs. Eventually, by the time I entered college, also,

Were your parents pushing you because they clearly wanted a better life for you, That's why they left China for the United States. So how much of this was coming from them and how much from your own sense of responsibility to them.

To their credit, they did not push me much. They're not tiger parents in today's language. I think part of it is they're just trying to survive, to be honest, and especially my mom, she is an intellectual at heart, she loves reading, but the combination of a tough, survival driven immigration life plus her health issues, she was not pushing me at all. As a teenager, I kind of had no choice. I either have to make it or not make it, and the stakes are pretty high. So

But I also going to avid reader that from your early childhood, you're putting away the children's books, tanning towards the classics, the drawn up books.

My mom liked reading, and she probably thought that you're talking about when I was nine ten. At that time, she probably did have influence more influenced. She thought I was precocious enough that just read some grown up books.

You also had a teacher who is really important in

I excelled in math, and I liked math, and I befriended the head teacher, mister Bob Sabella. And the math teacher, we became friends through the mutual love of science fiction reading, and.

We start read in Chinese.

At that time, I was reading in Chinese. Eventually I started reading English. He's a remarkable person because he probably saw in me this desire to learn, so he went out of his way to create opportunity for me to continue to excel in math. I remembered I placed out of the highest curriculum of math, and so there was no more courses for me. He would use his lunch hours to create a one one class for me to do. Now that I'm grown up, I know he was not

Life because he still alive mister Sabella.

Mister Isabella passed away when I was assistant professor at Stanford, but his family, his two sons, his wife, and I I think they are my new Jersey family.

At this point, you used the word love about what he did for you, and I wonder if they also He and his family introduced you to American society with your first friends and an entrance to the whole world of America beyond your school.

Absolutely, they introduced me to the quintessential middle class American family. They live in a suburban house, they have two lovely kids. Of course they're all married and have the grand children generation now, but it was a great window for me to know the society, to be grounded, to have friends and have a teacher who cared.

Do you think you could have had the career that you have had in China because now there are like significant advances happening in AI in China.

I don't think I'm able to answer this question because I think life is so serendipitous, right the journey would be very different, and in a way we could have simulated all possibilities. But what is timeless or what is invariant for anyone is the sense of curiosity, the pursuit of north stars. So if I were me, I will still be doing AI somehow, I believe.

Do you still feel connected to China?

It's part of my heritage. I feel very lucky that my career has been in America, higher education and in Silicon Valley then as also in and out of industry and being in tech. The combination of all these ingredients is very global. The environment my family right now is in, which is Stanford, San Francisco, Silicon Valley, is very international,

And of course it is a global industry. But there are some really striking advances in China, not least the number of patents, in the number of AI public papers coming out the Deep Seek moment earlier this year. As you look ahead in this century, do you think China

I do think China is a powerhouse in AI. In this moment, most people would recognize the two leading countries in AI are China and US. The excitement, the energy, and also frankly, the ambition of many regions and many countries in the world of wanting to have a roll in AI, wanting to catch up or even come ahead in certain areas AI. That is pretty universal.

And your own next frontier spatial intelligence. Tell me what

Yeah? So, spatial intelligence is the ability for AI or frankly, any intelligence to understand, perceive, reason and interact and also create spaces worlds. It comes from a continuation of visual intelligence. The first half of my career around the image that at time was trying to solve the fundamental problem of understanding what we are seeing, and that was a very important problem. But it's not enough because that's a very

And I've looked on your website and I've seen the preview that you've released Marble. You can see essentially a virtual world which one goes into and from room to room, and one door opens and you go from one place to another. But I'm not sure how you use it. Is it essentially to you a tool for training AI. It's a different way to train AI, rather than for example, meta saying this is in the metaverse. This is a world you can go into and spend time and as a human being.

Right, So let's just be clear with the definition. Marble is a frontier model. It's a frontier world model. What it does is not just to see and go into a world. What's really remarkable is it generates a three D world at a simple prompt. A prompt could be give me a modern looking kitchen, or the prompt could be here's a picture of a modern looking kitchen. Make it a three D world. The ability to create a

Interesting I'm imagining girls in Afghanistan, Maybe you could do virtual classrooms in a very challenged place.

Yes, Or I'm imagining, for example, how do you explain to an eight year old what is a cell? One day, we'll create a world that's inside of a cell, and then the student can walk into that cell and understand the nuclears, enzymes, the membranes. So you can use this for so many possibilities. So that's your next frontier, can

Which is happening of their customer support roles are going to go because of AI.

Right and software engineering, contact centers, analyst jobs, So it will, there's no question about it.

It's not going to create as many jobs in its place, is it. I wonder if that worries you.

The juris store out there. Every time humanity has created a more advanced technology, for example steam engine, electricity, PC cars, we have gone through difficult times, but we also have gone through real landscaping of jobs. So only in talking about the number bigger or smaller doesn't do justice. We need to look at this in a much more nuanced way and really think about how to respond to this change.

Number two is an even bigger question. If you take those headphones, I want to play you the voice and a view on the existential question about whether human beings are going to be replaced by AI. And this is a voice you will know Professor Jeffrey Hinton, whose work has overlapped with yours and who is a no laureate as well.

When AI gets super intelligent, it might just replace us. How do we prevent it taking over? Even if all the countries collaborate, what do you do? And I think at present, all the big companies and governments have the wrong model. Their basic model is I'm the CEO, and this super intelligent AI is the extremely smart executive assistant. I'm the boss. It's not going to be like that when it's smarter than us and more powerful than us.

What do you think of that? Because Professor Hinton thinks it's a ten to twenty percent chance that AI leads to human extinction.

So, first of all, Professor Hinton or I call him Jeff, because I have known him for twenty five years since I was first a graduate student. He's someone I admire and studied his technical papers. But this thing about replacing human race, I actually do respectfully disagree, not in the sense that it will never happen. It is in a sense that if human race became really being trouble, in my opinion, that's a result of humans doing wrong things, not machines doing wrong things.

But the very practical point that he put in that clip is where he says, how do we prevent the super intelligent creation taking over at the point that it becomes more intelligent than us? We have no model for that. Now, if that creation that is more intelligent than us, says, turn off human beings life support or do something else. That is existential? How would we stop it?

So? I think this question has made an assumption, which is from today, which we don't have such a machine, super intelligent machine, Yet we still have a distance, We still have a journey to take from today to that day. And my question is why would humanity as a whole

Which is why I wonder, then, do you think there is a way to make sure that there is an upper limit to superintelligence?

I think there is a way to make sure there is a responsible development and usage of.

Technology internationally agreed, like at the government level. Is it a treaty? Is it just companies agreeing to right?

You're right? The field is so nascent that we don't yet have the level of international treaties. We don't yet have the level of global consent. I think we have global awareness, and I do want to say that we shouldn't over click out the only one possible consequences or negative consequences of AI. This technology is powerful. It might have other negative consequences. It also has a tone of benevolent applications for humanity. We need to look at this holistically.

Do you get frustrated by some of the questions? And because I know you talked to politicians, people with political power a lot. You've done that in the US, You've done that in the UK and in France and elsewhere. What's the most common question they ask you that you find frustrating.

I wouldn't use the word frustrating. I would use the word concerned, because I think our public discourse of AI need to move from the very simple question of what do we do when machine overlord is here? So I don't get frustrated, I get concerned if the only way to ask this question is is very simple binary do

Answer it? Then people listening to this are probably thinking exactly the same. What do you say?

I say that AI is a very powerful technology, and I'm my mother. The most important thing we should empower our kids is to empower them as humans with agency, with dignity with the desire to learn, and there are timeless values of humanity. Be an honest person, be a hard working person, be creative. Worry about what they'll study.

I've got another industry question, which is about the huge sums of money that are flowing into again, not that many companies like yours, and whether this might be a bubble, whether this might be like a dot com bubble where it turns out that some of these companies are overvalued.

First of all, my company is still a startup. When we're talking about huge amount of money, we really look at the big techs. AI is still a nascent technology,

But what does it cost in terms of power and therefore energy and therefore climate. There's a prominent AI entrepreneur you probably know, Jerry Kaplan, who said that we could be heading for a new ecological disaster because of the

This is an interesting question. I do think that in order to train large models, we're seeing more and more need for power or energy. But nobody says these data centers must be powered by fossil fuel. For example, Our innovation and the energy side will be part of this innovation cycle, right.

I think it's just because the amount of power they need is so enormous it's hard to see it coming from renewable energy alone.

I think right now this is true, but I also know that as for example, I visit Middle East, there's a lot of effort in building renewable energy for big data centers. I do think that countries that need to build these big data centers need to also examine its energy policy and industry. This is an opportunity for us to invest and develop more renewable energy.

What worries you about your industry because you're painting a very positive picture, and you've been at the forefront of this and you see much more potential. So I understand where you're coming from.

But in quite a moment, I'm not a tech utopian,

This is the Bloomberg Weekend Interview. And so we're always interested in people's lives as well as their work. And I realize that your life, the life that you're living today, is so different from the way that you grew up, working in your parents dry cleaner, keeping it a lot.

Of laundry at home.

So are you conscious of the power that you have as a leader in this industry of our time in the future.

I'm conscious of my responsibility. I understand I'm one of the people who brought this technology to our world. I understand that I'm so privileged to be working at the one of the best universities in the world, educating tomorrow's leaders and doing the cutting edge research. I'm conscious of myself being an entrepreneur and a CEO of one of

And the humans in your life, your children, what do you not let them do with AI or with their devices or on the internet.

It's the timeless advice of don't do stupid things with your tools. You have to think about why you're using the tool and how you're using it. It could be as simple as don't be lazy just because there is AI. Right, if you want to understand math, maybe large language models can give you the answer, but that is not the way to learn. As the questions. You could use the AI tool to prompt a good question so that you learn because of it. So don't be lazy is one

I think you're sort of calling for old fashioned values

Yeah, honestly, I read a lot of technical papers these days.

Well, that series is going to keep you going for quite a long time, Yes, depending on I'm most cure at.

Yeah.

So you're not taking away the children's books in their lives, then.

No, because they live in a totally different time. They actually are exposed to information in a completely different way from my time. There's like barely TV in the nineteen nineties or eighties in China. Now they have the entire Internet. I give them a kindle and Chinese. Do you speak to them in Chinese? I speak to them in not great but I do speak to them in Chinese, and their father speak to them in Italian.

Okay, citizens of the world, Yes, as you've become as well, Doctor Fayfaeley. Thank you so much. Thank you, Michelle, And that's the Michelle Hussein Show for this week. Do subscribe if you haven't already. That way you'll know as soon as we have a new episode. Thank you for the comments and the ratings, and don't forget you can email