How to be 'fearless' in the AI age, with Fei-Fei Li and Reid Hoffman

**SPEAKER_1** (0:01)
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**SPEAKER_2** (1:07)
Hey folks, this week on the show we're sharing Reid Hoffman's conversation with Dr. Fei-Fei Li from our 2025 Masters of Scale Summit.
Fei-Fei is a brilliant computer scientist and author who has been at the forefront of AI development for decades. She was a founding director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and is now the co-founder and CEO of World Labs. She joined Reid on stage for candid reflections on where we are and where we're headed as AI evolves. I think you'll enjoy this.

**Reid Hoffman** (1:55)
I've lost count of the number of times we've done this, and it's always awesome and an honor. So thank you for being here.

**Fei-Fei Li** (1:59)
Thank you. I've lost count too.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:01)
Yes. Obviously, anyone who's following your career knows that you're one of the OG in the way of AI, ImageNet, all of these things that are contributions that are fundamental to where we are today. So by the way, thank you for that. And now you're working on spatial intelligence and world building. Say a little bit about why you took a sabbatical from a job you love with human-centered AI and Stanford CS and started building this company. And what are you doing?

**Fei-Fei Li** (2:32)
So Reid, you are one of the original supporters, investors of OpenAI. So when OpenAI was founded, you and I talked about the dream of AGI. As an AI scientist, I'm torn between the word AI versus AGI because they more or less mean the same thing for me. But language aside, what is...

**Reid Hoffman** (2:53)
Actually, I use AGI for the AI we haven't invented yet.

**Fei-Fei Li** (2:56)
Okay.

**Reid Hoffman** (2:57)
Yes.

**Fei-Fei Li** (2:59)
So what is AGI to me? AGI to me is the capability of intelligence of machines that are on par with humans and in many cases can be superseding humans. And I think about this as a door to the future. And on this door, there are multiple keyholes.
And language is one of them. One of the major ones because language is an essential part of intelligence to the point that, I know you are a quasi philosophy major, that Wittgenstein. Quasi is actually a positive word. At Stanford, I have to say, because Reid is an alumni, there is a very special major called symbolic systems. They combine philosophy and cognitive science and computer science.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:46)
By the way, I was the eighth person to declare that major.

**Fei-Fei Li** (3:48)
Oh, my God. So many famous people come out of that major. Yeah. So quasi, it just means the proportion. So it's a good word.

**Reid Hoffman** (3:59)
She'll correct me later, but that's all right.

**Fei-Fei Li** (4:00)
I'm digging myself out of a hole. Wittgenstein says that language defines the limit of world. I'm actually disagreeing with that.

**Reid Hoffman** (4:13)
Excellent.

**Fei-Fei Li** (4:14)
Because I think language defines a certain level of boundary that the world can be described in symbolic forms. But beyond that, the world is actually limitless. What is that world? How do we define that? What does that have to do with intelligence? How do we use machines to express that? I love that whole thing in the world modeling. World modeling is very connected to language, but it's about expressing, representing, and eventually participating in the changes of the state of the world. That could be virtual, it could be physical. What does world modeling entail? It does entail language because language is one form of interrogation with the world. But it also entails the visual, the lights, the semantics, the space, the physical actions. And all of that is still at the dawn and it's the next phase of AI. And that's what World Labs is about. We are trying to do world modeling and we're trying to bring that level of spatial intelligence into the next chapter of AI.