At a time when women are disappearing from the tech industry, one AI visionary is making more of an impact than ever.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is reportedly building technology with human-like visual data processing abilities
At a time when women are disappearing from the tech industry, one AI visionary is making more of an impact than ever.
The so-called “godmother of AI,” Dr. Fei-Fei Li, has built an AI startup called World Labs that’s already worth $1 billion, according to The Financial Times. Li has been tight-lipped about her plans for the startup, but unnamed sources in May told Reuters that the company will focus on developing technology capable of human-like visual data processing and advanced reasoning.
“Curiosity urges us to create machines to see just as intelligently as we can, if not better,” Li said during a Ted talk in April. “And if we want to advance AI beyond its current capabilities, we want more than AI that can see and talk. We want AI that can do.”
Andreessen Horowitz and the AI fund Radical Ventures are funders of World Labs.
Li is renowned for her contributions to AI. She invented ImageNet, a dataset used for advancing computer vision that many see as a catalyst for the AI boom. She consults with policymakers as they work to set up guardrails for the technology, and was named one of 12 national AI research resource task force members by the U.S. White House in 2021.
She’s also less pessimistic about AI’s potential for harm than other leaders in the field. In an interview at Bloomberg Technology Summit in May, Li said she thinks the pervasive “doom and gloom” about generative artificial intelligence is overblown.
“There’s so many ways we can use this to make people’s life better, work better,” she told Bloomberg’s Emily Cheng.
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