🧚♀️ Fei-Fei Li is the fairy godmother of artificial intelligence.
MUSTREAD 📚
The book "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI" by Stanford University professor Fei-Fei Li came out at the end of November in Macmillan Publishers and immediately topped the best books about AI lists.
Our editorial team hasn’t read it yet, but these are the people who strongly recommend this autobiography:
• Barack Obama, 44th President of the United States, recommended this book as one of the best ones ever written about artificial intelligence.
• Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Prize winner in chemistry and CRISPR pioneer.
• Ed Catmull, co-founder of Pixar.
• Reid Hoffman, co-founder of LinkedIn and Inflection.
The Financial Times included this book in its Best Books of 2023 list.
Summary
The Worlds I See is a first-person account of science, documenting one of the century's defining technological moments. The book offers a fascinating story about a scientist’s work and explains the essence of artificial intelligence and its development. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion needed for scientific research but also to the eternal curiosity that drives it.
The author herself calls the book a love letter to science and AI. She writes about her childhood in the poor Chinese town of Chengdu in the 1980s and moving later to the United States, working part-time in her parents' laundry, getting accepted to Princeton, and working as Vice President at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud.
Fei-Fei Li’s Achievements:
• Created ImageNet. In 2009, it was the largest database in the history of AI for developing and testing methods of pattern recognition and advancing computer vision.
• It was her idea to later sort and describe almost 1 billion images.
• Directed the AI lab at Stanford.
• Was VP of Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud.
• 💯 In 2023, Times magazine included her in The 100 Most Influential People in AI list.
In a meeting with President Biden in June 2023, Li called for a "moonshot mentality." She advocated for significant government investment in AI development, comparable to funding the space program, to ensure that AI serves the public interest.
Some quotes from Fei Fei Li's recent interview in the Guardian:
"Of course, I don’t take responsibility for how all of AI is being used. Should Maxwell take responsibility for how electricity is used because he developed a set of equations to describe it?"
"The world came to know ImageNet in 2012 when it powered a deep learning neural network algorithm called AlexNet [developed by Geoffrey Hinton’s group at the University of Toronto]. It was a watershed moment for AI because the combination gave machines reliable visual recognition ability, really for the first time. Today when you look at ChatGPT and large language model breakthroughs, they too are built upon a large amount of data. The lineage of that approach is ImageNet."
"I’m passionate about embodied AI [AI-powered robots that can interact with and learn from a physical environment]. It is a few years away, but it is something my lab is working on. I am also looking forward to the applications built upon the large language models of today that can truly be helpful to people’s lives and work. One small but real example is using ChatGPT-like technology to help doctors write medical summaries, which can take a long time and be very mechanical. I hope that any time saved is time back to patients."
📹 We recommend watching Fei-Fei Li's TED talk "How we teach Computers to understand pictures"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=40riCqvRoMs
#mustread @hiaimedia
