Tim FerrissDr. Fei-Fei Li, The Godmother of AI — Asking Audacious Questions & Finding Your North Star
EVERY SPOKEN WORD
55 min read · 10,819 words- 0:00 – 0:36
Preview
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I think the ability to learn is even more important.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
AI has really changed it. For example, my startup, when we interview a software engineer, honestly, how much I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now. It's more about what have you learned? What tools do you use? How quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools? And a lot of these are AI tools. What's your mindset towards using these tools matter more to me.
- 0:36 – 2:39
Why it's so remarkable this is our first time meeting.
- TFTim Ferriss
Dr. Li, it is nice to see you. Thanks for making the time.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Hi, Tim. Very nice to be here. Very excited.
- TFTim Ferriss
And we were chatting a little bit before we started recording about how miraculous and, I suppose, unfortunate it is that somehow we managed to spend three years on the same campus and didn't bump into each other. [laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I know, and now I'm wondering which college you were at and which clubs. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Oh, yeah. I was Forbes. I was in Forbes College.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
No, I was Forbes, too.
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay, this is for people who don't know what the hell we're talking about. There are these residential colleges where students are split up when they come into the school, and Forbes was way out there [laughs] in the sticks right next to a, a fast food spot like 7-Eleven called Wawa.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Wawa. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] And next to the commuter train. And then there's something called eating clubs at Princeton. People can look them up, but they're effectively co-ed fraternity/sororities where you also eat, unless you want to make your own meals, and I was in Terrace.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I was not any of that. But for those of you wondering why we didn't meet, we should say we were very studious students-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... who were only in the libraries. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. We were very studious. I actually made my, whatever it was, six dollars an hour at Guest Library working up in the attic. [laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Tim, I work in the same library. I don't understand why we did not meet.
- TFTim Ferriss
That's really hilarious. Okay. Yeah, so well, now we're meeting.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Did you change name or something? [laughs] Maybe we did meet. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] I did, didn't change my name, but here we are.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
We've reunited. That's wild that we didn't bump into each other. I was also gone for a period of time because I went to Princeton in Beijing-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Mm
- TFTim Ferriss
... and went to the, what was it? Capital University of Business and Economics after that. And so I was gone for a good period of time and then took a year off before graduating with the class of 2000.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Mm.
- TFTim Ferriss
So still, we had a lot
- 2:39 – 4:15
From a childhood in Chengdu to New Jersey
- TFTim Ferriss
of overlap.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
But let's hop into the conversation, and this is a very perhaps typical way to start. But in your case, I think it's a good place to start, which is just with the basics chronologically. Where did you grow up, and could you describe your upbringing? Because based on my reading, your parents were pretty atypical for Chinese parents in my experience, [laughs] certainly.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes. You know a lot. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. Could you speak to that, please?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I would say my childhood and leading up to the formative years is a tale of two cities. I grew up in a town in China called Chengdu. I was born in Beijing, but most of my childhood was spent in Chengdu, where it's very famous for panda bears.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And at the age of 15, my mom and I joined my dad in a town called Parsippany, New Jersey.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So I went from a relatively typical middle-class Chinese family, Chinese kid-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... to become a new immigrant in a completely different world, of all places, New Jersey, to learn a new language, to learn a new culture, to, to embrace a new country.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And then from there on, I went to Princeton as a physics major, but I did take some of the classes you took. [laughs] And, and then went to Caltech as a PhD student to study AI, and, and the rest
- 4:15 – 7:13
Being raised by the opposite of tiger parenting.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
is history.
- TFTim Ferriss
I wanna hear about both your parents, but I wanna hear a little bit about your dad because he seems like, based on my reading, a very whimsical sort of creative soul, which is a sharp contrast in some ways to, for instance, I had Bo Shao on the podcast, amazing entrepreneur, and his father was, I suppose, what some folks might think of when they imagine not a tiger mom, but, like, a tiger dad. So in the case of-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... Bo's upbringing, his father was very strict, but if he, if he, meaning Bo, won a math competition, then he would get extra love, and he would be allowed to have certain treats and things like that. Could you just describe your parents a little bit?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
First of all, clearly you read my book. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Uh-huh.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Thank you for that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
It is true, as a child, you don't realize, as I was just going through my, my own science memoir, I was writing it, the more I wrote about it, the more I realized, oh my God, I really did not have a typical dad.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
My dad loved, and still loves, nature. He's just a curious mind. He finds humor and fun in unserious things.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
You know? Like, he loves bugs, insects.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Growing up in the 1980s in China, there isn't much abundance in terms of material resources.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But my city, Chengdu, was expanding, so we lived in apartment complexes at the edge of the city, even though my dad and my mom worked in the middle of the city. So on the weekends, my dad and I would just play in the fields where there's still rice fields. There's water buffalos. I had a puppy. Really, all my memory is just, like, finding bugs, really.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And then sometimes my dad and I would We'll follow some... I don't know, we took an art class, I took a kids art class and we'll go to the mountains, neighboring mountains to draw.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But my entire childhood memory of my dad is, is just a very unserious parent who had no interest in my grades or what I'm doing in class. Did I achieve anything? Did I bring back any competition awards? Nothing to do with that.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Even when I came to New Jersey with my parents, life became extremely tough, right? It was-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... immigrant life. We were in a lot of poverty, and even that my memory is that he had so much fun in yard sales.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Like, I would just go to yard sales and, and those are our... Every weekend it was just, "Yay, let's go to yard sales," [laughs] and just-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... use that as a treasure hunt almost.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- 7:13 – 10:44
Why Dr. Li's brave parents left everything behind.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
that way.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm asking about your parents in part because I know you're a parent, and ultimately I'm gonna want to ask how you think about parenting. Uh, that will come up at some point. But since listeners will certainly be asking themselves this question, and we're not gonna get into any geopolitics 'cause there are plenty of people who wanna get into that and fight over that, which we're not gonna do, but why did your parents leave China? Like, what was the catalyst or what were the reasons behind leaving what you knew or leaving what they knew and coming to a very different foreign country? Where, I mean, you're going from Chengdu, [laughs] which is a city, to suburban New Jersey, [laughs] which is, as I think you've described it, felt very empty, right? And then you have the language barriers and the financial barriers. There's so many things. Why the move?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I'll give you two answers. In the early teenage Fei-Fei would say, "I have no idea."
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Because my dad left when I was 12, and my mom and I joined him when I was 15, and those years you're, you're a teenager, right? Like, there's so many strange things in your head, and all I knew is that, you know, they said, "Let's go to America," and I had no idea. I really did not know what happened. There was this vague sense of there's opportunities and freedom.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
There's this, that education is very different. And I had a hunch that I was not a typical kid-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... in the sense that, you know, I was a girl and-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... I loved physics, I loved fighter jets of all things, [laughs] you know?
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I can tell you all the fighter jets I love from F-117 to F-16 to, you know, to all the different things that I, I loved. So that's all I knew.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
In hindsight, as a grown-up Fei-Fei, I appreciated my parents. They're very brave people 'cause I don't know this age myself would just pick up and, and leave a country I'm familiar with and go to, I don't know, a completely different country that I speak zero language and I have zero connectivity to.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And mind you, that's pre-internet, pre-AI age.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So when you are going to a different country, you're com- you're just... You might as well go to a different planet.
- TFTim Ferriss
You're cut off.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I think they're very brave. The grown-up Fei-Fei realized that they wanted me to have an opportunity that, that they think will be unprecedented for, for my education.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And it turned out that's, that's kind of true. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. [laughs] Well, certainly looking at your bio, I mean, it's mind-boggling to imagine all of the different sliding door events and different paths you could have taken. So we're gonna hop pretty closely along chronologically, but we're gonna ultimately get to a lot of the meat and potatoes of the conversation. But I want to touch on maybe some other formative figures, and I would like to hear about your mother as well because just with the context of your dad, it's like, okay, that seems fascinating and very unusual, particularly if you've spent any time in China, especially during that period of time. [laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
He is very unusual that way.
- 10:44 – 16:48
Bob Sabella: The math teacher who sacrificed lunch hours for an immigrant kid.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, very unusual. So then people might wonder, well, where does the drive come from? Where does the technical focus come from? And I'd love to hear your answer to that and also hear you explain who Bob Sabella was, if I'm pronouncing that correctly.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes. There are two questions. Mostly, you know, is my mom the one who put in the drive and the technical passion and, and what role did Bob play in my life? So first of all, my mom has zero technical genes. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I sometimes still laugh at her. She cannot do math-
- TFTim Ferriss
Right
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... let's put it this way. So I think the, the technical passion is just I was born with it.
- TFTim Ferriss
Innate.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
My dad was more technical, but he loves bugs more than insects, more than equations, for sure.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So I think that's, you know, as an educator for so many decades now myself and also as a parent, you have to respect the wonders of nature. There is this inner love and fire and, and passion and curiosity that comes with the, with the package, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So... But my mom is much more disciplined person. She, she's still not a tiger mom in the sense I don't remember my mom ever going after me on grades or she really did not... My- both my parents never, ever cared about me bringing any awards home.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Maybe I did, maybe I didn't, but I can tell you in our house There's zero wall hangings of anything, which actually carry to today. Even for myself, my own house, my own office have zero of those decorations of achievements or awards. It's just, uh, my mom did not care about that, but she did care about me being a focused person. If I wanna do something, she doesn't want me to play while doing homework and that, that kind of thing would bother her. She would say-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... "Just finish your homework, say, by 6:00 PM. If you don't finish your homework, you're not allowed to do more homework. You have to deal with the consequences." So she-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... she instilled some discipline, but that's about it. She's tougher than my dad. She is very rebellious. She had a unfinished dream herself. She was very academic when she was a, a kid herself, and Cultural Revolution really crushed all her dreams.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
She became a more rebellious person in that sense that I think I did observe and, and experience as a daughter.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Maybe part of immigration is even part of that. Many years later, she would say, "I had no plan coming to New Jersey, but I think I'm gonna survive. I just believe I'm gonna survive, and I'm gonna make sure Fei-Fei survives."
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I think that is her strength, her stubbornness, and her rebelliousness.
- TFTim Ferriss
When does Bob enter the picture, and who is Bob?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Bob Sabella was a high school math teacher in Parsippany High School. He, he was my own math teacher as well as many, many students'. He entered my life in my second year in Par- so it was kind of bordering sophomore to junior year in Parsippany High School when I started taking AP Calculus, but he quickly became the most influential person in my formative years as a new American kid, immigrant, as a teenager because he became my mentor, my friend, and eventually his entire family became my American family.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And he became my friend when I was a very lonely ESL, English as Second Language, student.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I was excelling in math, but I think it's more because I was lonely and he was very friendly. He treated me more like a friend who talks about books we love, talk about the culture, talks about science fiction.
- 16:48 – 18:01
Seven years running a dry cleaning shop through Princeton.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. I have so much I wanna cover, and I know we're gonna run out of time before we run out of topics, so I wanna spend more time on Bob, and at the same time, I wa- wanna keep the [chuckles] conversation moving. So we're, we're going to do that, and I'll just perhaps hit on a few things and then dig into a number of questions. But certainly at Princeton, you, but also your entire family, had to survive, so you were involved with operating a dry cleaning shop in New Jersey as one option, right? You ran that for seven years. So through that, it feels like you've gained perspective on many different levels that have then helped inform what you've done professionally, right? So you, you learn to think about not just people who are protected in an ivory tower, but people all the way down in, across in society, so from every swath of society. Your mother also, although she was not technical, she imbued in you this discipline and also seems to have had a very broad appreciation and knowledge of literature and international literature. So now you have this global perspective, presumably at the time in Chinese, and [chuckles] then you end up, you end up at Princeton. And
- 18:01 – 20:32
How ImageNet birthed modern AI.
- TFTim Ferriss
I know we're gonna be hopping around quite a bit, but I'm curious to know how ImageNet came about, and you can introduce this any way you like. You can tell people what it is and what it became and why it's important and then talk about how it started, or you can just talk about how it started, but it's, it's such a, an important chapter.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So let me just explain what ImageNet is. ImageNet, on the surface, was built between 2007 and 2009 when I was assistant professor at Princeton, and then I moved to Stanford. So during this transitional time, my student and I built this, at that time, the field of AI's largest training and benchmarking data set for computer vision or visual intelligence. The significance today, after almost 20 years of ImageNet, was it was the inflection point of big data. Before ImageNet, AI as a field was not working on big data, and because of that, and a couple of other reasons, which I'll get into, AI was stagnating. Uh, the public thinks that was the AI winter, even though as a researcher, young researcher at that time, it was the most exciting field for me, but I get it. It wasn't showing breakthroughs that the public needs.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But ImageNet, together with two other modern computing ingredients, one is called neural network algorithm. The other one is modern chips called GPU-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... graphic processing unit. These three things converged in a seminal work, milestone work in 2012 called ImageNet Classification: Deep Convolutional Neural Network Approach.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
That was a paper that a group of scientists did to show that the combination of large data by ImageNet, fast parallel computing by GPUs, and a neural network algorithm could achieve AI performances in the field of image recognition in a way that's historically unprecedented. And that particular milestone is, many people call it the birth of modern AI, and my work, ImageNet, was one-third of that, [laughs] if you count the elements. And I think that was the significance. I feel really very lucky and privileged that my own work was pivotal in bringing modern AI to life.
- 20:32 – 24:38
From fighter jets to physics to the audacious question: What is intelligence?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But the journey to ImageNet was longer than that.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
The journey to ImageNet started in Princeton when I was an undergrad. You were in the East Asian Study Department.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I was hiding in Jadwin Hall-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... which is our physics department.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I loved physics since I was a young kid. I, I don't know how, somehow my dad's love of bugs and insects and nature translated in my head into just the curiosity for, for the universe. So I loved, you know, looking to the stars. I loved the speed of fighter jets and the intricate engineering of that. Eventually, it translated into the love of the discipline that, that asks the most audacious question of our civilization, such as, what is the smallest matter? What is the definition of space time? How big is the universe? What is the beginning of the universe? And in that, in that early teenage-hood love, I loved Einstein. I love his work.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I wanted to go to Princeton for that. But it turned out what physics taught me was not just the math and, and physics. It was really this passion to ask audacious question. So by the end of my undergrad years, I wanted my own audacious question. You know, I wasn't satisfied with just pursuing somebody else's audacious question. And through reading books and all that, I realized my passion was not the physical matters. It was more about intelligence.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I was really, really enamored by the question is, of what is intelligence, and how do we make intelligent machines? So at that time, I swear I did not know it was called AI. I just knew that I wanted to pursue the, the study of intelligence and intelligent machines. And then I applied to grad school, and I went to Caltech. Caltech was my PhD. I started in the turn of the century, 2000, and I think I consider that moment I became a budding AI scientist.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
You know, that was my formal training as a computer scientist in AI. Then my physics training continued in the sense that physics taught me to ask audacious question and turn them into a North Star.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And in scientific terms, that North Star became a hypothesis.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And it was very important for me to define my North Star, and my first North Star for the following years to come was solving the problem of visual intelligence, is how, how we can make machines see the world. And it's not just by seeing the RGB colors or the shades of light. It's about making sense of what's seen, which is, you know, I'm looking at you, Tim. I see you. I see a beautiful painting behind you. I don't know if it was real. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I see you're sitting on a chair. Like, that is seeing. Seeing is making sense of what this world is. So that became my North Star question, and the hypothesis that I had is I have to solve object recognition.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And then that was in my entire PhD, was the battle with object recognition. There were many, many mathematical models we have done, and there are many questions, but me and my field was struggling. We can write papers, no problem, but we did not have a breakthrough. And then luckily for me, Princeton called me back as a faculty in 2007. It was one of my happiest moment of my life. I feel so validated my alma mater-
- TFTim Ferriss
[chuckles]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... would consider giving me a faculty job. So I happily moved back to Princeton as a faculty this time, and I continue to be a Forbes member, actually. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- 24:38 – 26:04
The epiphany everyone missed: Big data as the hidden hypothesis.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So at Princeton, there was a epiphany, is that I realized there was a hypothesis that everybody missed, and that hypothesis was big data.
- TFTim Ferriss
Could I pause you there for a second?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Because this is the, this is the point that I'm so, so curious about, and I just wanna pause for a second. Also, for people who are interested in some of the history of Princeton, it's pretty crazy. They should look up the history of the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, and I remember taking some of those East Asian studies classes that you referred to in classrooms where Einstein taught.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
It's just the aura, the veneer. You want to believe that you can feel it just permeating the, uh, the entire campus, and it's fun. In, in that respect, it's very fun. But I'm gonna read something from a Wired piece that discussed you at length, and as you mentioned, big data before and after in terms of its integration into the type of research that you're describing. As it was written, and please feel free to fact-check this or push back on it, but in Wired they said, "The problem was a researcher might write one algorithm to identify dogs and another to identify cats." And then you, it says, you know, Li, began to wonder if the problem wasn't the model, but the data. She thought that if a child learns to see by experiencing the visual world, by observing countless objects and scenes in her early years, maybe a computer can learn in a similar way. I want you to expand on that for sure,
- 26:04 – 29:29
Against the single-genius myth: Science as non-linear lineage.
- TFTim Ferriss
and the question for me is like, why did you see it, right? Why didn't it happen sooner?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
We're all students of history. One thing I actually don't like about the telling of scientific history is there's too much focus on single genius.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yes. Agreed.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
We know Newton discovered the modern laws of physics, but yes, he is a genius, not to take [laughs] away any of that from Newton, but, but science is a lineage.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And science is actually a non-linear lineage. For example, why was I inspired by this hypothesis of big data? Because many other scientists inspire me. In my book, I talked about this particular lineage of work by Professor Irv Biederman, who was a psychologist, who was... He was not interested in AI, but he was interested in understanding minds. And I was reading his paper, and he particularly was talking about the massive number of visual objects that young children was able to learn in early ages, right? So that piece of work itself is not ImageNet, but without reading that piece of work, I would not have formulated my hypothesis. So while I'm proud of what I have done, my book especially wanted to tell the history of AI in a way that so many unsung heroes, so many generations of scientists, so many cross-disciplinary ideas pollinate each other. So I was lucky at that time as someone who is passionate about the problem, but also someone who benefited from all this research. So yes, something happened in my brain, but I would really attribute to many things happened across so many people's work throughout their lifetime devotion to science that we got to the point of ImageNet.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm so glad that you're underscoring this because if you really dig as a... I don't consider myself a scientist, but I, I love reading about the history of science. There's so many inputs, so many influences, so many interdependencies.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
And the simplicity of the single hero's journey is appealing in its simplicity, but it's almost never true. [laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
It probably is never true.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Even my biggest hero, Einstein, right? He-- Anybody who knows me, anybody who read my book knows how much I revere him, and I just love everything he's done. The special relativity equation is a continuation of Lorentz transform. Even Einstein, he builds upon so many other people's work. So I think it's really important, especially, I'm sure we'll talk about it, I'm here calling you in the middle of Silicon Valley, and we're in the middle of a AI hype, and obviously, I'm very proud of my field, but I think that when the media or whatever tells the story of AI, it almost always just talk about a few geniuses, and it's just not true. It's generations of computer scientists, cognitive scientists, and engineers who, who made this field happen.
- TFTim Ferriss
For sure. I mean, everyone knows Watson and Crick, for, for instance, but without Rosalind Franklin and her X-ray crystallography, it doesn't happen.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
Doesn't happen. It just doesn't happen,
- 29:29 – 36:10
Amazon Mechanical Turk: When desperation breeds innovation.
- TFTim Ferriss
point-blank. We're gonna hop to modern day in a second, but with ImageNet, I would love for you to speak to some of the decisions or let's say decisions or moments that were just formative in making that successful, right? Because, for instance, if you're going to try to allow a machine to, and I'm using very simple terms 'cause I'm not technical enough to do otherwise, to learn to identify objects closer to the path that a child would take, you have to label a lot of images, [laughs] right? And I was reading about how Mechanical Turk came into play, and then there's a competitive aspect- That seems to have driven some of the watershed moments. Could you just speak to some of the elements or decisions that made it successful?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
A lot of people ask me this question because after ImageNet, many, many people have attempted to make datasets, but still only very few are successful, so what made ImageNet successful? I think one of the success was timing, is that we truly were the first people who see the impact of big data, so that very categorical or qualitative change itself is part of the success.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But it's also, as you were asking, the hypothesis of big data is not just size. A lot of people actually misunderstands ImageNet's significance, as well as other datasets' significance. Coming with the dataset is a scientific hypothesis of what is the question to ask. For example, in visual recognition, you can talk about, you can make a dataset of discerning RGB, and that would not be as impactful of a dataset that is organized around objects.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
We can go down a rabbit hole of why. Not because RGB is easier per se, it's because you have to ask the scientific question the right way. Another example is instead of making a dataset of objects, why don't you make a dataset of cities?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
You know, that's even more complicated than objects, but then that's dialing too complicated. So every scientific quest, you have to have the right hypothesis and, and asking the right question. So that's one part of the success, is we defined visual object categorization as the right hypothesis.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
That was one rightness, [laughs] I guess. Another rightness is that people just think, "Oh, it's easy. You just collect a lot of data." Well, first of all, it's laborious, but even aside from being laborious, how do you define the quality?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
You could say, "Well, if quality is big enough, we don't care about quality," but how do you dial between what is big, what is good-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... and how do you trade off? That is a deeply scientific question that we have to do a lot of research on. And then another decision that is a set of decision that is really hard is what defines quality in terms of image? Is it every image has higher resolution? Is it it's photorealistic? Is it because it's everyday image that look very cluttered? Is it all product shots that look clean? These are questions that if you're too far away, you wouldn't even think about asking, but as a scientist, as we were formulating the deep question of object recognition, we have to ask this in so many dimensions. And then you mentioned Amazon Mechanical Turk. That is actually a consequence of desperation. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Because when we formulated these, this hypothesis, our conclusion is we need at least tens of millions of high-quality images across every possible diverse dimension, whether it's user photos or is it product shots or is it stock photography, like... And then we need also high-quality labels. Once we make that decision, we realize this has to be human filtered from billions of images.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So with that, we became very desperate. We're like, "How are we gonna do that?" You know? I did try to hire Princeton undergrads and-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs] No way.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
As you know, Princeton undergrads are very smart, but-
- TFTim Ferriss
They have very high opinion of the value of their time.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes, and they're expensive, but-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... even if I had all the money in the world, which we didn't, it would have taken so long. So we were very, very stuck for very, very long. We thought we had other shortcuts, but the truth is human labeling is a gold standard.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
We want to train machines that are measured against human capability, so we cannot shortcut that at that time.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So we had to go to what we eventually found out is called crowd engineering.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Crowdsourcing, and that was a very new technology. Was barely a year old or so by Amazon. They, they created a lo- online marketplace for people to do small tasks to earn money when these tasks can be uploaded on the internet. I remembered when I heard about Amazon Mechanical Turk, I logged into my Amazon account. I checked, the first task I checked out to do just to try was labeling wine bottles or transcribing wine bottle labels. The task would give you a picture of a wine bottle, and you have to say, "This is 1999 Bordeaux," and, [laughs] and all that.
- 36:10 – 38:41
Quality control puzzles: How do you stop people from seeing pandas everywhere?
- TFTim Ferriss
It's just so wild when you look at these stories. I just finished a book on Genentech, and there were all these little technical inflection points that also allowed things to happen, right? So if it had been five years earlier- [laughs] Or maybe three years earlier, right, without Mechanical Turk. Uh, boy, like it presents a challenge.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yep.
- TFTim Ferriss
But also, as you pointed out, in science, it's one thing to get answers, but you need the input on the front end with a proper hypothesis or a good question. And even with Mechanical Turk, right, if you're only focused on the, the mechanics of employing that, you can get yourself into trouble because if humans are incentivized, right, to, let's just say, I think this was the example I read about, identify pandas in photographs, and they're paid for identifying pandas, well, what's to stop them from identifying a panda in every photo, whether they exist in the photos or not?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Right? [laughs] So you have to follow the in- incentives as well. How did you solve for that?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
This is where, you know, my student and I had-- I cannot tell you how many hours and hours of conversation we have about controlling the quality. We have to solve for that in multiple steps. We need to first filter out online workers who are serious about doing the work. So for example, we have to have some upfront quizzes-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... so that they understand what a panda is.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
They read the question, and then once they get into-- they qualify for that, we ask them to label pandas. But there are some images we know the correct answer. Some are true pandas, some are, some are not true pandas.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yep.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But the labelers don't know. So in a way, we implicitly monitor the quality of the work by knowing where the gold standard answers are.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So these are the kind of computational tactics we have to use to ensure the quality of labeling.
- TFTim Ferriss
Amazing. Just incredible. I'd like to just put a recommendation out there for a book, Pattern Breakers by a friend of mine, Mike Maples Jr. He taught me the ropes initially of angel investing. But in terms of identifying inflection points and in some cases converging technological trends that for the first time make something possible, which then opens an opportunity, right, for something with the right prepared mind, in your case, and those of your collaborators and the people you built upon for something like ImageNet, Pattern Breakers is a really good read for folks.
- 38:41 – 42:19
The "Godmother of AI" on what everyone's missing: People.
- TFTim Ferriss
So let's, let's hop to modern day then for a moment, and I would love to ask you, right, because you've been called the Godmother of AI in our alumni magazine, in fact, and elsewhere, but you've had such a not just technical but historical viewpoint, meaning you've, over a broad timeline, well, broad by AI standards, been able to watch the development and forking and perils and promise of this technology. What are people missing? What do you think is eating up all the oxygen in the room? What are people missing? Whether it's things they should know or things they should be skeptical of or otherwise.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Especially I'm here calling you from the heart of Silicon Valley, and I think people are missing the importance of people in AI.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And there's multiple facades or dimensions to, to this statement, is that AI is absolutely a civilizational technology. It's-- I define civilizational technology in the sense that because of the power of this technology, it'll have or already having a profound impact in the economic, social, cultural, political downstream effects of our society. So-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... I just heard, this is unverified, but I just heard that fifty percent of the US GDP growth last year is attributed to AI growth.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Apparently, this number is four percent for US GDP have grown four percent. If you take away AI, it's only two percent. That's what means-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... that's civilizational from an economic point of view. It's obviously redefining our culture, right? Think about, you're talking about the word sucking oxygen out of the room. Everywhere from Hollywood to Wall Street to Silicon Valley to political campaign, to TikTok, to YouTube, to Insta.
- TFTim Ferriss
Taxis in Japan. I was just there, and the video's playing on the back of the headset in the taxi were all talking about AI. It's everywhere.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
It's culturally impactful. Not only impactful, it's shifting our culture. And it's gonna shift education. Every parent today is wondering what, what should their kids study to have a better future. Every grandparent is saying, "I'm so glad I'm born early. I don't have to deal with [laughs] AI," but still worry about their grandchildren's future. So AI is a civilizational technology, but what I think it's missing right now is that Silicon Valley is very eager to talk about tech and the growth that comes with the tech. Politicians are just eager to talk about whatever gets them vote, I guess. But really, at the end of the day, people are at the heart of everything. People made AI. People will be using AI. People will be impacted by AI, and people should have a say in AI. And no matter how AI advances, people's self-dignity as individuals, as a community, as society should not be taken away. And that's what I worry about because I think, I think there's so much more anxiety that because the sense of dignity and sense of agency, sense of being part of the future is slipping in some people, and I think we need to change
- 42:19 – 45:57
Civilizational technology: AI's fingerprints on GDP, culture, and Japanese taxi screens.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
that.
- TFTim Ferriss
I've heard you say that you're an optimist because you're a mother, and both optimism and pessimism to an extreme Can bias us in ways that are unhelpful, right? Or create blind spots. And I'm curious if you try to put your most objective hat on, which is difficult for any human, but if you try to do that, do you think people are too worried, not worried enough, or worrying about the wrong things? For people who are not CEOs and builders and engineers behind AI, 'cause you're right, of course, I mean, everybody will agree with this, that a lot of people are very worried, and I'm just wondering if it's, if it's ill-placed because I don't really... If you talk to some of the VCs who are the biggest investors, of course, they have this sort of, in my view, beyond all possibilities techno-optimist view of the future where AI solves everything, right? And it's hard to believe there's a free lunch there. And then you have the, the doomers, the doom and gloom, where suddenly it's Skynet next year and we're all slaves to robots. We're eliminated, turned into paperclips. And reality's probably in between those two. Do you think people are worrying about the right things, or have they lost the plot in some way?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
First of all, I call myself a pragmatic optimist. I'm not a utopian, so I'm actually the boring kind.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I don't believe in the extreme on both sides. I travel around the world. Just last month, I was in Middle East, I was in Europe, I was in UK, and I, I was in Canada. I came back home in America. I think people in America and people in Western Europe are more worried about AI than, say, people in Middle East-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... in Asia. And I think we don't have to litigate why they're more worried-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... but just to come closer to home, just in, talk about US, I wish I have a megaphone to tell people in the US that you're known to be one of the most innovative people.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Our country have innovated so many great things for humanity, for civilization. We have a society that is free and vibrant, and we have a political system that we still have so much say in how we wanna build our country. I do wish that our country has more optimism and positivity towards the future of using AI than what is being heard now. I think people like me, technologists living in Silicon Valley, has a lot of responsibility in the right kind of public communication, so there's a lot of things that was not communicated in an effective way. But I do hope that we can instill more sense of hope and self-agency into everybody in our country because I think there is so much upside-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... of using AI in the right way, and I want not just people in Silicon Valley or in Manhattan, but I want people in rural communities, in traditional industries, in everywhere, 50 states, to be able to embrace and, and benefit from
- 45:57 – 47:46
Pragmatic optimist: Why neither utopians nor doomsayers have it right.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
AI.
- TFTim Ferriss
Why are you building what you're building? What is World Labs? Why decide to do this?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I actually answer this question very often to every member of my team.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I built World Labs... There are two levels of this answer. From a technology point of view, World Labs is building the next-generation AI, focusing on spatial intelligence.
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Because spatial intelligence, just like language intelligence, is fundamental in unlocking incredible capabilities in machines so that it can help humans to create better, to manufacture better, to design better, to build better robots, so spatial intelligence is a linchpin technology.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But one level up, why am I still a technologist, is because I believe humanity is the only species that builds civilizations. Animals build colonies or herds, but we build civilizations, and we build civilizations because we wanna be better and better. We wanna do good, even though along the way we do a lot of bad things, but there is a desire of having better lives, having better community, having better society, live more healthily, have more prosperity.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
That desire is where civilization is built upon, and because I believe that humanity can do that, I believe science and technology is the most powerful tool, one of the most powerful tools in building civilizations, and I wanna contribute to that. That's why I'm still a scientist and a technologist, and I'm building World Labs for that.
- 47:46 – 49:47
Why World Labs: Spatial intelligence as the next frontier beyond language.
- TFTim Ferriss
Can you explain to people what spatial intelligence is and what the product is, so to speak, at least as it stands right now, that you're building?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Spatial intelligence is a capability that humans have which goes beyond language. It's when you pack a sandwich in a bag, when you take a run or a hike in a mountain, when you paint your, your bedroom. Everything that has to do with seeing and turning that seeing into understanding of the 3D world, understanding of the environment, and then in turn you can interact with it, you can change it, you can enjoy it, you can make things out of it. That whole cap- Loop between seeing and doing is supported by the capability of spatial intelligence, right? The fact that you can pack a sandwich means you know what the bread looks like, you know how to put the knife in between, you know how to put the lettuce leaf on the bread, uh, you know how to, like, put the bread or sandwich into a Ziploc bag. Every part of this is spatial intelligence.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And does today's AI have that? It's getting better, but compared to language intelligence, AI is still very early in that ability to see, to reason-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... and also to do in world, in both virtual 3D world as well as real 3D world. So, so that's what World Labs is doing. We are creating a frontier model that can have intelligent capability in the model to create world, to reason around the world, and to enable, for example, creators or designers or, or robots to interact with the world. So that's spatial intelligence.
- 49:47 – 53:38
Medieval French towns on a budget: How World Labs serves high school theater
- TFTim Ferriss
Could you expand on the, you know, designers or creatives or robots interacting with the world? So does that mean that you could... And my team has been playing with, with some of the tools, so thank you for that. What does that mean? If you could paint a picture for, let's say, a year from now, two years from now, how might someone use this or how might a robot use this?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I was just talking to someone a couple of weeks ago, and it was really inspiring, is that high school theaters are very low budget, right?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Like, okay, sometimes I go to San Francisco Opera or musicals and the sets that's built for theater are just so beautiful.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But it's very hard for high school or-
- TFTim Ferriss
It's expensive [laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... middle school to have that budget to do that. Imagine that you can take today's World Labs model, we call it Marble.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And then you create a set in medieval French town.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And then you put that in the background and use that digital form to help transport the actors and action into that world. And of course, depending on the auxiliary technology, whether you're on a computer or eventually people can use a headset or whatever, you can have that immersive feeling of being in a medieval French town.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
That would be an amazing creative tool for a lot of creators.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
That was the example someone... And I was talking about it a couple of weeks ago, but we already see creators all over the world, some of them are VFX creators, some of them are interior design creators, some of them are gaming creators, some of them are educators who wanna build some worlds that transport their students into different experiences, are already starting to use our model-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... because they find it very powerful at their fingertip to be able to create 3D worlds that they can use to, to immerse either their characters or themselves into.
- TFTim Ferriss
And just to process-wise, if, if someone's wondering how this works, let's just say it's a, a public school teacher, let's just say, who's hoping to inspire and teach their students going the extra mile. What does it look like for someone to use this? Are they typing in text describing the world they'd like to create, uploading assets or photos, almost like an image board? How does it, how does it work if someone's non-technical?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
They don't need to be technical at all. They open our page on desktop or in their phone, but desktop is more fun 'cause it has more-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... features, and then they can type, you know, a French medieval town or, or they can actually go to anywhere. They can use Midjourney or Nana Banana to create a photo of a French medieval town, or they can get an actual photo about that, and then they upload it. We call it prompt. And then after a few minutes, our model gives you a 3D world that is, say, a part of the town.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
It, it does have a limit in its range, and then that 3D world is generally 3D 'cause you can just use the mouse to drag and turn around and walk around and see that world. And then downstream, if you wanna use it, you have many ways to use it. You can actually create a movie out of it-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... by using one of our tools on the website to just put cameras and you can make a particular movie out of it. You could... If you're a game
- 53:38 – 56:15
Flight simulators for robots and strawberry field therapy for OCD.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
developer-
- TFTim Ferriss
I was just gonna say it sounds a lot like a gaming engine.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
You, you can put a lot of characters in it. If you're a VFX professional, we have a lot of VFX professional, they can actually take this and put it in the workflow of their movie shooting and have real actors shooting movies. We've also have psychology researchers using that immersive world, in particular psychiatric studies.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
We could also use that as the simulation for robotic training-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... because a lot of robotic training needs a lot of data, and then use that for generating a lot of different data.
- TFTim Ferriss
So is it almost like a flight simulator for robots before they go into the real world?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
That's part of the goal. We are still early, so the flight simulator is not complete yet.
- TFTim Ferriss
Right.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But that's part of the journey.
- TFTim Ferriss
You mentioned psychiatric studies. I, I think that's what you just mentioned.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes.
- TFTim Ferriss
What might that look like?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
We actually got this researcher who called us, and they're studying people who have- Psychological disorders like obsessive compulsive disorder-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... where they're triggered by certain environments-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... and they wanna study the trigger-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yep
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... and also to study how the treatment. But how do you trigger someone who, let's say, is particularly have issue with, let's say, a strawberry field?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I'm just making it up.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I mean, you can take them to a strawberry field-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... but what about you wanna know if it's a strawberry field in the summer or strawberry field at night?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- 56:15 – 57:50
The scientists who don't make headlines: Spelke, Gopnik, Brooks, and the cognitive giants.
- TFTim Ferriss
Who are some scientists or researchers who you pay attention to who are not necessarily kind of the big brand names and marquee lights that are already very public in the world? Is there anybody who stands out where you're like, "You know, there are some really tremendous people doing good work"?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Well, that's part of the reason I wrote the book is, especially in the middle chapters where I wrote about the journey of doing ImageNet that combines cognitive science with computer science, and I actually talk about psychologists and neuroscientists and developmental psychologists in... You know, some of them are still with us, some of them are not.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
For example, the, the late Anne Treisman, Irv Biederman, they all passed away in the last few years, but they were giants in cognitive science whose work has informed computer science and eventually AI. You know, there are still lots of scientists around the world, many of them are in the US, who are thinkers in developmental psychology in AI. I follow their work.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I think the world of science, just to name some names, right, Liz Spelke in-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... in Harvard, Alison Gopnik in Berkeley. I l- love Rodney Brooks, who was a former MIT professor in robotics.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And there's just a lot of them. I, I don't mean to just single them out.
- TFTim Ferriss
Sure.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But you're asking me for names that are not in, in the news of AI. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. That's perfect, thank
- 57:50 – 1:00:58
What's underappreciated: Spatial intelligence, AI in education, and the messy middle of labor.
- TFTim Ferriss
you. I would also love to get your perspective on what might be, this is a very strong word, but seemingly inevitable in s- in terms of developments in the near intermediate future, and I'll give you an example of what I mean. In 2009, 2008, 2009, I became involved with Shopify, the company, back when they had like 10 employees, and there were a few things happening around that time. And you could ask questions, you know, in the next 10 years or 20 years, will there be more broadband access or less? More. Okay, will there be more e-commerce or less? There'll be more. Okay. And when you have four or five of those that seem over a long enough time horizon absolute yeses, it begins to paint a picture of where things are going. Are there any things that in the next handful of years you think are perhaps underappreciated as near inevitabilities?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
You want me to talk about underappreciated. I mean, I don't know if they're overappreciated, but definitely appreciated the need for, for power is appreciated.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
The trend of more AI, not less AI is appreciated.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
The long-term trend of robots coming is appreciated. So these are appreciated. What's underappreciated is, spatial intelligence is underappreciated in the sense that everybody's still now talking about language, large language models. But really-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... world modeling of pixels, of 3D worlds is underappreciated because like you were saying, it powers so many things from storytelling to entertainment to, to experiences to robotic simulation. I think AI in education is underappreciated because what we are going to see is that AI can accelerate the learning for those who wanna learn-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... which will have downstream implication in our school system-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... as well as in just human capital landscape, like how do we assess qualified workers?
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Used to be which school you graduate from with, with which degree, but that will be changing-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... with AI being at the fingertip of so many people. That's underappreciated. I think AI's impact in our economic structure, including labor market, is underappreciated. The nuance is underappreciated. I think this whole rhetoric of either total utopia post scarcity is hyperbolic-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... or like everybody's job will be gone is hyperbolic.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But the messy middle is how, from knowledge worker to blue collar to hospitality to all these changes that's happening, it's underappreciated by our policy workers, by our scholars, by just Overall society
- 1:00:58 – 1:03:25
Hiring at World Labs: Why tool embrace matters more than degrees.
- TFTim Ferriss
Well, what are some of the nuances from the job perspective? Maybe this ties into what I promised earlier I was gonna ask you, which is what you [laughs] are telling or will tell at unknown other ages your children, or recommending. Let's just say, I don't know how old they are, but if we assume that they, just for the sake of discussion, of the age where they're trying to decide what they should study, where they should focus, things of that-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... nature, how, how would you think about answering that, even provisionally?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I think the ability to learn is even more important because when there was less tools, fewer tools to learn, it's easier to just follow tracks. You go through elementary school, middle school, high school, college, and then get some, you know, get some training vocationally, and that's kind of a path. And with that is a set of structured credentials from degrees and all that. But AI has really changed it. For example, my, my startup, when we interview a software engineer, honestly, how much I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now. Is more about what have you learned? What tools do you use? How quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools? And a lot of these are AI tools. What's your mindset towards using these tools matter more to me.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
At this point in 2025, hiring at World Labs, I would not hire any software engineer who does not embrace AI collaborative software tools.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
It's not because I believe AI software tools are perfect. It's because I believe that shows, first of all, the ability of the person to grow with the fast-growing toolkits, the open-mindedness, and also the end result is if you're able to use these tools, you're able to learn, you can superpower yourself better.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
So that is definitely shifting. So coming back to your question, what do you tell young people, tell children? I think the timeless value of learning to learn-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... the ability to learn is even more important now.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah. It, [laughs]
- 1:03:25 – 1:06:14
Rethinking evaluation: Show students AI's B-minus, then challenge them to beat it.
- TFTim Ferriss
it strikes me as we're talking that it's only going to get increasingly easier for the ambitious to act as super-powered autodidacts, right? We've already seen this-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes
- TFTim Ferriss
... with certainly YouTube has a nice track record now. You can either entertain yourself to death and avoid doing things that help with self-growth and development-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... or you can supercharge it. And similarly with AI, right, you flash forward, we don't even need to flash forward, but it's how does a teacher audit that their students are doing the work they're supposed to be doing?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
On so many levels, it's getting to the point, there are some exceptions, but of near impossibility.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah.
- TFTim Ferriss
And students can either avoid all work or they can supercharge their own work, but the output might look very similar, at least for a period of time. So schooling is gonna change a lot. It's very, very interesting.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I actually think, Tim, if the school evaluation is structured in a way that whatever AI gives and whatever the student gives is the same-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... there's something wrong with the structure of the evaluation.
- TFTim Ferriss
Okay. Can you say more about that? That's interesting.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
For example, English essay.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
This is not me. This is me hearing a story that I so agree with. I'll retell the story, is that as a high school freshman English class teacher, I heard that someone told me the story of their kid's school. On the first day of school, the teacher actually said to the class, "I wanna show you how I would score AI." So the teacher give an essay topic, show the students this is what the best AI gave me, and I'm gonna show you how I think this is good, this is bad, how this is suboptimal, and I'll give it a B-minus. Now, I will tell you, this is my bar. If you're so lazy that you ask AI to write your essay, this is what you are gonna get. But you can use AI, that's totally fine, but you, you can do the work, learn, think, be the best human creator you can, and work on top of that.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
You can get to A, you can get to A-pluses, and that would be, in my opinion, the right way to structure the evaluation. Is not to pit humans against the AI and then try to police the use or not use of AI, is that to show where the tools, the bar of the tools are-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... and where the bar of the human learner should be.
- TFTim Ferriss
I'm gonna sit with that example and try to think of more examples. It's very interesting. And boy, oh boy, I've been shocked by how quickly the models improve. But yes, that's, like as a thought experiment-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... I'm gonna chew on that.
- 1:06:14 – 1:07:54
Dr. Li's Billboard.
- TFTim Ferriss
I know we only have a few minutes left. Fei-Fei, I wanted to ask you a question I ask a lot, which is, if you could put a quote or a message, something on a billboard, something to get in front of millions, billions of people, just assume they all understand it. Could be an image, could be a question, could be a quote, anything at all. A saying, a mantra, doesn't matter, could be almost anything. What would you or what might you put on that billboard?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
What is your North Star?
- TFTim Ferriss
Hmm. What is your North Star? This is, of course, critically important, and coming back to how you define that or find that for yourself, I mean, you were talking about audacious questions. And then that leading to a North Star hypothesis. Is there another way that you would encourage people on top of that to think about finding their North Star?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I believe that's how that makes us so human and makes us to be so fully alive-
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... is that we as, as a species can live beyond the chasing of just basic needs, right? But dreams and missions and goals and passion, and everybody's North Star is different.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
And that's fine. Not everybody has to have [laughs] AI as their North Star, but finding that goes to the heart of education again, and I don't mean formal classroom education, it's just the journey of education. A lot of that is ability to learn who you are and to learn how to formulate your North Star and how to chase after that.
- 1:07:54 – 1:09:21
The fortuitous naming of Fei-Fei.
- TFTim Ferriss
Last question, did your parents ever explain to you why they named you Fei-Fei?
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yes. It's because when my mom was going through labor, my dad was characteristically late to the hospital-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... and along the way he caught a bird. He let it go, but he did catch a bird.
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
I don't know if he was just distracted. [laughs] And, uh-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... it, it was in Beijing, the city of Beijing. My dad was bicycling to my mom's hospital.
- TFTim Ferriss
Mm-hmm.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
That inspired him to call me Fei-Fei. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Fei-Fei.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Oh, wait, sorry. For those who don't speak Chinese, I forgot you do speak Chinese-
- TFTim Ferriss
[laughs]
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
But for those who don't speak Chinese, Fei means flying.
- TFTim Ferriss
Means flying.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah. So be-
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
... inspired by a bird.
- TFTim Ferriss
Really quick, I'll just say, 'cause it's kinda funny, my first Chinese name that I had was Fei Ting Cheng-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Oh
- TFTim Ferriss
... which is because I was very blunt and honest, so Ting Cheng, but Fei Ting Cheng. But when I f- was first starting, my tones in China were not polished, and people thought I was saying that my name was Fei Ji Cheng, which is a-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
[laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
... airport.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Airport. [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
So I petitioned my teachers, and we changed my name to something less, less confusing.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
What's your new name? [laughs]
- TFTim Ferriss
Fei Yu Cheng.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Oh, okay.
- TFTim Ferriss
Fei Yu Cheng.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
[laughs]
- 1:09:21 – 1:09:44
Parting thoughts.
- TFTim Ferriss
Dr. Li, thank you so much for the time. We will link to the show notes for everybody at tim.blog/podcast. They'll be able to find you easily, and everybody should check out worldlabs.ai, and we'll put every other link, your social and so on-
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Yeah
- TFTim Ferriss
... in the show links. But thank you for the time. I really appreciate it.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Thank you, Tim. I enjoyed our conversation.
- TFTim Ferriss
Yeah, likewise.
- FLDr. Fei-Fei Li
Okay. Bye.
- TFTim Ferriss
Bye.
Episode duration: 1:10:06
Install uListen for AI-powered chat & search across the full episode — Get Full Transcript
Transcript of episode z1g1kkA1M-8
