The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:00)
A lot of people call you the godmother of AI. The work you did actually was the spark that brought us out of AI Winter.

**Fei-Fei Li** (0:05)
In the middle of 2015, middle of 2016, some tech companies avoid using the word AI because they were not sure if AI was a dirty word. 2017-ish was the beginning of companies calling themselves AI companies.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:22)
There's this line, I think this was when you were presenting to Congress, there's nothing artificial about AI, it's inspired by people, it's created by people, and most importantly, it impacts people.

**Fei-Fei Li** (0:30)
It's not like I think AI will have no impact on jobs or people. In fact, I believe that whatever AI does currently or in the future is up to us, it's up to the people. I do believe technology is a net positive for humanity, but I think every technology is a double-edged sword. If we're not doing the right thing as a society, as individuals, we can screw this up as well.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (0:56)
You had this breakthrough insight of just, okay, we can train machines to think like humans, but it's just missing the data that humans have to learn as a child.

**Fei-Fei Li** (1:03)
I chose to look at artificial intelligence through the lens of visual intelligence because humans are deeply visual animals. We need to train machines with as much information as possible on images of objects. But objects are very, very difficult to learn. A single object can have infinite possibilities that is shown on an image. In order to train computers with tens and thousands of object concepts, you really need to show it millions of examples.

**Lenny Rachitsky** (1:36)
Today, my guest is Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who's known as the godmother of AI. Fei-Fei has been responsible for and at the center of many of the biggest breakthroughs that sparked the AI revolution that we're currently living through. She spearheaded the creation of ImageNet, which was basically her realizing that AI needed a ton of clean, labeled data to get smarter. And that data set became the breakthrough that led to the current approach to building and scaling AI models. She was chief AI scientist at Google Cloud, which is where some of the biggest early technology breakthroughs emerged from. She was director at SAIL, Stanford's artificial intelligence lab, where many of the biggest AI minds came out of. She's also co-creator of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute, which is playing a vital role in the direction that AI is taking. She's also been on the board of Twitter. She was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI. She's also on the United Nations Advisory Board. I could go on. In our conversation, Fei-Fei shares a brief history of how we got to today in the world of AI, including this mind-blowing reminder that nine to ten years ago, calling yourself an AI company was basically a death knell for your brand. Because no one believed that AI was actually going to work. Today, it's completely different. Every company is an AI company. We also chat about her take on how she sees AI impacting humanity in the future, how far current technologies will take us, why she's so passionate about building a world model, and what exactly world models are. And most exciting of all, the launch of the world's first large world model, Marble, which just came out as this podcast comes out. Anyone can go play with this at marble.worldlabs.ai. It's insane. Definitely check it out. Fei-Fei is incredible and way too under the radar for the impact that she's had on the world. So I am really excited to have her on and to spread her wisdom with more people. A huge thank you to Ben Horowitz and Condoleezza Rice for suggesting topics for this conversation. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. With that, I bring you Dr. Fei-Fei Li, after a short word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by Figma, makers of Figma Make. When I was a PM at Airbnb, I still remember when Figma came out and how much it improved how we operated as a team. Suddenly, I could involve my whole team in the design process, give feedback on design concepts really quickly, and it just made the whole product development process so much more fun. But Figma never felt like it was for me. It was great for giving feedback and designs, but as a builder, I wanted to make stuff. That's why Figma built Figma Make. With just a few prompts, you can make any idea or design into a fully functional prototype or app that anyone can iterate on and validate with customers. Figma Make is a different kind of vibe coding tool. Because it's all in Figma, you can use your team's existing design building blocks, making it easy to create outputs that look good and feel real and are connected to how your team builds. Stop spending so much time telling people about your product vision and instead show it to them. Make code-backed prototypes and apps fast with Figma Make. Check it out at figma.com/lenny.