AI Leaders

Fei-Fei Li

Professor & Co-director, Stanford HAI · Stanford University / World Labs
United StatesResearcherScientistFounderComputer VisionSpatial IntelligenceAI Policy

Fei-Fei Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford and co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI (HAI). She led the creation of ImageNet, whose 2012 challenge results launched modern deep learning. She served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud and co-founded World Labs, focused on spatial intelligence.

Education: PhD, Caltech · BA in physics, Princeton University

Career timeline

  1. 2009
    ImageNet released
    A 14-million-image labelled dataset presented at CVPR 2009.
  2. 2012
    ImageNet challenge breakthrough
    AlexNet's win on ILSVRC starts the deep-learning boom.
  3. 2017
    Google Cloud AI
    Serves as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud.
  4. 2019
    Stanford HAI founded
    Co-founds Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered AI.
  5. 2024
    World Labs
    Co-founds a company focused on spatial intelligence and 3D world models.

Major achievements

  • ImageNet
  • Stanford HAI
  • AI4ALL non-profit for AI education access

Public perspectives

Testimony · 5/1/2023

Calls for human-centered AI: research, policy and product decisions evaluated by their effect on human dignity, labour and community — and for public-sector compute so academia can keep doing frontier research.

Stanford HAI

Books & writing

  • The Worlds I See — Memoir on curiosity, immigration and the birth of ImageNet.

Official sources

Stanford profile Stanford HAI ImageNet