🤨 Interesting Talk by Fei-Fei Li at TED Talks

Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li compared robots capable of operating in space to trilobites: both are the first in history to gain vision.

🧐 In the Beginning, There Was Darkness

This was the world 540 million years ago. Pure, endless darkness. It was dark because of a lack of sight. Although sunshine did filter a thousand meters beneath the surface of the ocean, there was not a single eye. So for unknown reasons, trilobites, the first organisms that could sense light, emerged. The ability to see is thought to have ushered in the Cambrian Explosion.

🤨 Computers See and Create

The first computer vision algorithm that can describe a photo in natural language was work done with my former student, Andrej Karpathy. I said, Andrej, can we make computers to do the reverse? And Andrej said, ha-ha, that's impossible. Well, today's generative AI can take a human-prompted sentence and turn it into photos and videos.

🤖 A New Science for Robots

A group of researchers from Google has developed an algorithm to take a bunch of photos and translate that into 3D space. My colleagues at Stanford have developed an algorithm that takes one image and generates infinitely plausible spaces. These are prototypes of the first science of a future possibility, one in which humans can transform our world into a digital model. This back and forth is catalyzing robotic learning that needs to understand and interact with the 3D world.

💥 The Digital Cambrian Explosion

The emergence of vision turned a world of darkness upside down. It set off the most profound evolutionary process, the development of intelligence. AI's breathtaking progress in the last decade is just as astounding. But I believe the full potential of this digital Cambrian explosion won't be fully realized until we power our computers and, and robots with spatial intelligence.

Read more on this topic:

🧚‍♀️ Fei-Fei Li is the fairy godmother of AI

💡 An Educational Lecture from Andrej Karpathy

#ted @hiaimediaen