Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab,[10][11] and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud and the director of theStanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.[12][13][14] In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization working to increase diversity in the field of artificial intelligence.[15][16] In 2023, Li was named one of theTime 100 AI Most Influential People.[17]
On August 3, 2023, Li was appointed to theUnited Nations Scientific Advisory Board, established bySecretary-GeneralAntonio Guterres.[22][23] In 2024, Li was included on the Gold House's most influential Asian A100 list.[24] In 2024, she raised $230 million for a startup called World Labs, which she and three colleagues founded to develop a"spatial intelligence" AI technology that can understand how the three-dimensional physical world works.[25]
Li was born inBeijing, China, in 1976 and grew up inChengdu, Sichuan.[26] She studied atSichuan Chengdu No.7 High School.[27] When she was 12, her father immigrated toParsippany, New Jersey.[5] When she was 16, Li and her mother joined him in the United States.[27] While attendingParsippany High School, Li worked weekends at her family's dry-cleaning shop. She graduated from Parsippany High School in 1995.[5][28] She was inducted into the hall of fame at Parsippany High School in 2017.[29]
Li pursued undergraduate study atPrinceton University, where she received aBachelor of Arts with a major inphysics in 1999.[30] Li completed her senior thesis, "Auditory binauralcorrelogram difference: a new computational model forHuggins dichotic pitch", under the supervision of Bradley Dickinson, professor of electrical engineering.[31] During her years at Princeton, Li returned home most weekends to help run her family'sdry cleaning business[5][32] and worked as adishwasher to supplement the family income.[27]
From 2005 to 2006, Li was an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at theUniversity of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and from 2007 to 2009, she was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department at Princeton University. She joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor, and was promoted to associate professor withtenure in 2012, and then full professor in 2018.[34] At Stanford, Li served as the director ofStanford Artificial Intelligence Lab (SAIL) from 2013 to 2018. Her research has focused on computer vision, deep learning, and cognitive neuroscience, with over 300 peer-reviewed publications. She became the founding co-director of Stanford's University-level initiative - the Human-Centered AI Institute, along with co-director Dr.John Etchemendy, former provost of Stanford University.[35] The institute aligns with Li's aims to advance AI research, education, policy, and practice to improve the human condition.[36]
While at Princeton in 2007, Li led the development ofImageNet, a massive visual database designed to advance object recognition in AI. The project involved labeling over 14 million images using Amazon Mechanical Turk and inspired the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), which catalyzed progress in deep learning and led to dramatic improvements in image classification performance. The database addressed a key bottleneck in computer vision: the lack of large, annotated datasets for training machine learning models. Today, ImageNet is credited as a cornerstone innovation that underpins advancements in autonomous vehicles, facial recognition, and medical imaging.
On her sabbatical from Stanford University from January 2017 to fall of 2018, Li joinedGoogle Cloud as its Chief Scientist of AI/ML and Vice President.[37] At Google, her team focused on democratizing AI technology and lowering the barrier for entrance to businesses and developers,[38] including the developments of products like AutoML.[39][40]
In September 2017, Google secured a contract from the Department of Defense calledProject Maven, which aimed to use AI techniques to interpret images captured by drone cameras.[41][42] Google told employees who protested the company's work on Project Maven that their role was "specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes".[43] In June 2018, Google told employees it would not seek renewal of the contract.[42] In internal emails which were later leaked to reporters, Li expressed enthusiasm for the Google Cloud role in Project Maven, but warned against mentioning its AI component, saying that military AI is linked in the public mind with the danger ofautonomous weapons. Asked about those leaked emails, Li toldThe New York Times, "I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI."[44]
In the fall of 2018, Li left Google and returned to Stanford University to continue her professorship.[45]
According to her Stanford profile, she has been on partial academic leave from January 2024 through the end of 2025 to focus on entrepreneurial ventures.[46]
In 2024, Li said there was a disparity between private-sector investment in AI and support for academic and government research, and called for greater public funding for scientific uses of the technology and for studying its risks.[46]
Li is also known for her non-profit work as the co-founder and chairperson of nonprofit organization AI4ALL, whose mission is to educate the next generation of AI technologists, thinkers and leaders by promoting diversity and inclusion through human-centered AI principles.[47][48][49][50][51] The program was created in collaboration withMelinda French Gates andJensen Huang.[52][53]
Prior to establishing AI4ALL in 2017, Li and her former studentOlga Russakovsky,[54] currently an assistant professor in Princeton University, co-founded and co-directed the precursor program at Stanford called SAILORS (Stanford AI Lab OutReach Summers).[55][56] SAILORS was an annual summer camp at Stanford dedicated to 9th grade high school girls in AI education and research, established in 2015 till it changed its name to AI4ALL @Stanford in 2017.[56] In 2018, AI4ALL has successfully launched five more summer programs in addition to Stanford, includingPrinceton University,[57]Carnegie Mellon University,[58]Boston University,[59]University of California Berkeley,[60] and Canada'sSimon Fraser University.[61]
We are at a turning point. AI's influence continues to grow, but representation and inclusion of a diversity of researchers in the field does not. It's critical that we seize this moment to create structures that will support long-term, positive changes. This won't happen via a single mechanism or quick fix. It starts with early education and extends to the existing structures of power within academia, work cultures among current AI researchers, and gatekeeping functions of research publishing, to name a few levers of change.
Li has been described as a "researcher bringing humanity to AI".[63]
Li was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021,[64] the National Academy of Engineering in 2020,[65] and the National Academy of Medicine in 2020.[66]
In a November 2023 interview withThe Guardian, Li said that while she would not refer to herself as the "godmother of AI", she accepts the description as a way to recognize women's contributions to the field.[67]
In 2024, while on partial leave from Stanford, Li helped found a startup focused on developing artificial intelligence with "spatial intelligence", a concept involving an AI system's ability to reason about and act within three-dimensional environments. According toReuters, the company raised seed funding from investors.[46] TheFinancial Times later reported that the company, World Labs, had raised two rounds of funding and was valued at more than $1 billion.[68] The technology aims to integrate visual perception with action, such as enabling robotic systems to perform everyday tasks based on verbal instructions. Li described the effort as aiming for more human-like reasoning and interaction with the physical world.[46]
In February 2025, at theArtificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Li stated that AI governance should be based on science rather than "science fiction", and urged a more scientific approach to assessing AI capabilities and limitations.[69]
Li has received numerous accolades, including induction into the National Academy of Engineering (2020), the National Academy of Medicine (2020), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021). In 2025, she was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, recognizing her role in advancing deep learning.
In 2007, while at Princeton, Li began developingImageNet with the goal of building a large-scale visual dataset inspired by an estimate from cognitive psychologistIrving Biederman that humans recognize approximately 30,000 object categories. The project faced early skepticism from colleagues who considered the scale impractical, but Li continued development, ultimately usingAmazon Mechanical Turk to help label over 14 million images across 22,000 categories.[79]
Li has led the team of students and collaborators to organize the international competition on ImageNet recognition tasks calledImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) between 2010 and 2017 in the academic community.[80]
Li's research in computer vision contributed to a line of work called Natural Scene Understanding, or later, story-telling of images.[81] She was recognized for her work in this area by theInternational Association for Pattern Recognition in 2016.[82] She delivered a talk on the main stage of TED in Vancouver in 2015, and has since then been viewed more than 2 million times.[82]
She teaches the Stanford course CS231n on "Deep Learning for Computer Vision",[85] whose 2015 version was previously online atCoursera.[86] She has also taught CS131, an introductory class on computer vision.[87]
In May 2020, Li joined the board of directors ofTwitter as an independent director.[88] On October 27, 2022, followingElon Musk'spurchase of the company, Li and eight others were removed from Twitter's nine-member board of directors, leaving Musk as the sole director.[89][90]
On August 3, 2023, Li Fei Fei was announced as a member of theUnited Nations (UN) Scientific Advisory Board, established by Secretary-General António Guterres. She is among seven external scientists on this board, which also includes the Chief Scientists from various UN agencies, theUN University Rector, and the Secretary-General's Envoy on Technology. The board's primary aim is to offer independent perspectives on emerging trends that intersect science, technology, ethics, governance, andsustainable development. It is designed to act as a central hub for a network of scientific networks, enhancing the integration of scientific insights into UN decision-making processes.[22][91]
Ford, Martin (2018). "Fei-Fei Li".Architects of Intelligence: The Truth About AI from the People Building It. Birmingham, UK: Packt Publishing. pp. 145–162.ISBN978-1-78913-126-0.OCLC1083340727. Interview of Li by Ford.[116]
Li, Fei Fei (2023).The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI. New York, NY: Moment of Lift Books, Flatiron Books.ISBN978-1-250-89794-7.OCLC1404458360.[117][118]
Li Fei-Fei; Fergus, R.; Perona, P. (2004). "Learning Generative Visual Models from Few Training Examples: An Incremental Bayesian Approach Tested on 101 Object Categories".2004 Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshop. IEEE. p. 178.doi:10.1109/CVPR.2004.383.
^"A U.S. Secret Weapon in A.I.: Chinese Talent".The New York Times. June 9, 2020.The Google team worked to build technology that could automatically identify vehicles, buildings and other objects in video footage captured by drones
^abConger, Kate (June 1, 2018)."Google Plans Not to Renew Its Contract for Project Maven, a Controversial Pentagon Drone AI Imaging Program".Gizmodo. RetrievedMarch 18, 2021.Google secured the Project Maven contract in late September, the emails reveal, after competing for months against several other "AI heavyweights" for the work...One of the terms of Google's contract with the Defense Department was that Google's involvement not be mentioned without the company's permission, the emails state.
^Shane, Scott; Wakabayashi, Daisuke (April 4, 2018)."'The Business of War': Google Employees Protest Work for the Pentagon".New York Times. RetrievedMarch 18, 2021.Thousands of Google employees, including dozens of senior engineers, have signed a letter protesting the company's involvement in a Pentagon program that uses artificial intelligence to interpret video imagery and could be used to improve the targeting of drone strikes.
^Shane, Scott (May 30, 2018)."How a Pentagon Contract Became an Identity Crisis for Google".New York Times. RetrievedMarch 13, 2021.Asked about her September email, Dr. Li issued a statement: 'I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI.'
^Johnson, Khari (May 17, 2017)."Google unveils second-generation TPU chips to accelerate machine learning".Venture Beat. RetrievedMarch 30, 2021.Earlier this month, Li joined Melinda Gates and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang to create AI4All, an organization dedicated to encouraging AI adoption among communities underrepresented in AI.
^Yang, Kaiyu; Qinami, Klint; Fei-Fei, Li; Deng, Jia; Russakovsky, Olga (January 27, 2020). "Towards fairer datasets: Filtering and balancing the distribution of the people subtree in the ImageNet hierarchy".Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency. FAT* '20. New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery. pp. 547–558.doi:10.1145/3351095.3375709.ISBN978-1-4503-6936-7.
^"Elon Musk, who runs four other companies, will now be Twitter CEO". Reuters. October 31, 2022.'The following persons, who were directors of Twitter prior to the effective time of the merger, are no longer directors of Twitter: Bret Taylor, Parag Agrawal, Omid Kordestani, David Rosenblatt, Martha Lane Fox, Patrick Pichette, Egon Durban, Fei-Fei Li and Mimi Alemayehou,' Musk said in the filing.
^"Elon Musk Ousts Twitter Board, Named Sole Director".The Wall Street Journal. October 31, 2022. RetrievedNovember 7, 2022.The board that oversaw Twitter Inc. during its tumultuous sale to Elon Musk has been dissolved, with the Tesla Inc. chief now serving as the social-media company's sole director.
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