Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a generative AI company focusing on Spatial Intelligence. She is the...
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Dr. Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei ) is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, a founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI Financial Times best book of 2023.
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TIMESTAMPS
[00:00:00] Start. [00:01:22] Why it’s so remarkable this is our first time meeting. [00:03:21] From a childhood in Chengdu to New Jersey [00:04:51] Being raised by the opposite of tiger parenting. [00:07:53] Why Dr. Li’s brave parents left everything behind. [00:11:17] Bob Sabella: The math teacher who sacrificed lunch hours for an immigrant kid. [00:19:37] Seven years running a dry cleaning shop through Princeton. [00:20:50] How ImageNet birthed modern AI. [00:23:21] From fighter jets to physics to the audacious question: What is intelligence? [00:27:24] The epiphany everyone missed: Big data as the hidden hypothesis. [00:28:49] Against the single-genius myth: Science as non-linear lineage. [00:32:18] Amazon Mechanical Turk: When desperation breeds innovation. [00:39:03] Quality control puzzles: How do you stop people from seeing pandas everywhere? [00:41:36] The “Godmother of AI” on what everyone’s missing: People. [00:42:31] Civilizational technology: AI’s fingerprints on GDP, culture, and Japanese taxi screens. [00:47:45] Pragmatic optimist: Why neither utopians nor doomsayers have it right. [00:51:30] Why World Labs: Spatial intelligence as the next frontier beyond language. [00:53:17] Packing sandwiches and painting bedrooms: Breaking down spatial reasoning. [00:55:16] Medieval French towns on a budget: How World Labs serves high school theater. [00:59:08] Flight simulators for robots and strawberry field therapy for OCD. [01:01:42] The scientists who don’t make headlines: Spelke, Gopnik, Brooks, and the cognitive giants. [01:03:16] What’s underappreciated: Spatial intelligence, AI in education, and the messy middle of labor. [01:06:21] Hiring at World Labs: Why tool embrace matters more than degrees. [01:08:50] Rethinking evaluation: Show students AI’s B-minus, then challenge them to beat it. [01:11:24] Dr. Li’s Billboard. [01:13:13] The fortuitous naming of Fei-Fei. [01:14:46] Parting thoughts. *
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