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Joining hosts Dax Shepard and Monica Padman, 48-year-old Li revisited her teenage years, reflecting on the challenges she faced as an immigrant student in New Jersey, and the experiences that shaped her path to becoming a leader in artificial intelligence.
Li, who developed ImageNet, a revolutionary dataset that has been instrumental in the progress of computer vision, opened up about an attack on one of her young peers, at Parsippany High School, where she was an ESL student.
“I honestly did not see what happened to that boy, but all I knew was that my ESL friend was on the floor being kicked and punched,” Li shared, describing the painful moment in the school library.
The impact of the attack left a lasting impression on Li, as she recalled how their classmate was never the same after the incident.
“After he’s gone for a couple of weeks, he comes back and he’s just not the same boy,” Shepard said.
Li explained how the attack sent shockwaves through the ESL community at the school, creating an atmosphere of fear. “Nobody felt safe for a long while,” she said.
"I think it changes your world view on a dime, which is this new place I'm in can get pretty violent and pretty out of control, and if you're other this could happen," Shepard said.
Li had a different perspective, though."
"But it was also an environment where there was so much support, friendliness, and opportunity," she said. "So it was very confusing. I don't feel lucky about that experience... but in the meantime, the fuller context of that community was quiet a supportive community. It gave me the multidimensionality of the new country."
Shepard on Instagram shared another clip from the episode, in which he calls Li the "Godmother of AI."
Despite these early struggles, Li’s story is one of resilience and triumph. In 2017, she was inducted into the Parsippany High School Hall of Fame, a testament to the strength and perseverance that fueled her journey.
Li attended Princeton for undergrad and earned her MS and PhD from the California Institute of Technology.
From 2013 to 2018, Li served as Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory's director. In 2023, she was named to the Time 100 AI Most Influential People and earned the Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award and authored "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn Of AI."
Among subsequent accomplishments, Li this year was named to the Gold House's most impactful Asian A100 list and raised $230 million World Labs, a startup that she and three others founded to develop "spatial intelligence" AI technology.
Click here to listen to Fei-Fei Li on Armchair Expert.
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