AI Godmother Fei-Fei Li

AI godmother Fei-Fei Li. In 1994, at the age of 16, Fei-Fei Li immigrated from Chengdu to New Jersey with her parents. Her family was extremely poor—her mother worked in a laundromat, her father did odd jobs. She herself worked in a Chinese restaurant, wiping tables, making dumplings, and washing dishes every day after school. Their home was a shabby basement: damp, cramped, and windowless. But it was in that basement that she helped her mother fold clothes while desperately memorizing words from a borrowed English dictionary. She later recalled: At that time, her biggest dream was to get into a good college and change her family’s fate. Six years later, in 2000, she made it: entering Princeton University on an almost full scholarship, majoring in physics. After graduating, she received a full scholarship for her PhD at Stanford University, studying under computer vision pioneer Sebastian Thrun. Then came the year that changed the history of artificial intelligence: 2009. At that time, deep learning was still a niche academic topic, with the biggest bottleneck being “lack of data.” Fei-Fei Li, her mentor, and students spent four and a half years manually labeling 14 million images to create the ImageNet dataset. In 2009, they made the dataset completely free and open to the public. She said something very simple at the time: “We just want to share the data with the world so everyone can do research.” As it turned out, people not only “could do” research—they were blown away. In 2012, Alex Krizhevsky used ImageNet to train AlexNet, slashing the error rate in the image recognition competition from 25% to 15%, crushing all traditional methods. That moment officially triggered the deep learning revolution. ImageNet → AlexNet → ResNet → Transformer → BERT → GPT → LLaMA → Sora The origin of this chain was those 14 million images Fei-Fei Li gave away for free in 2009. So the whole world says: The “Big Bang” of modern AI started with ImageNet. From 2012 to 2016, she joined Google Cloud as Chief Scientist, bringing Google’s computer vision AI to world-leading levels. In 2017, Google participated in the US Department of Defense’s “Project Maven,” which aimed to use AI to identify objects in drone footage. Fei-Fei Li and many Google employees stood up and strongly opposed it. Reportedly, in one internal meeting, when an executive asked for her opinion, she said only one thing: “I will not compromise my values.” Eventually, Google announced its withdrawal from the project, and her name was at the top of the open letter of protest signed by thousands of employees. In 2018, she left Google and returned to Stanford to found the Human-Centered AI Institute (Stanford HAI). She defined the institute’s mission in a single sentence: “To advance AI to improve human well-being, not to replace or harm humanity.” She repeatedly emphasizes three things: AI must be human-centered AI must embrace diversity (she is particularly concerned about the representation of women and minorities in AI) AI must be understood and trusted by society Today, Stanford HAI is one of the most influential global institutions for AI ethics and policy research. Fei-Fei Li herself has been named one of TIME magazine’s 100 most influential people and is widely regarded in the industry as the “godmother of AI.” She often says: “When I was 16, studying English in the basement, I never thought I could change the world. I just wanted to survive and make life a little better for my family. But I believe that as long as you do the right thing, the world will bring opportunities to you.” This is Fei-Fei Li’s story: From an immigrant girl in a New Jersey basement, To the woman who ignited the age of AI, To the scientist who dared to say “No” to the Pentagon. She has proven one thing through her actions: True strength is not about mastering great technology, But about what you are willing to use that technology to protect.