Fei Fei Li
Appearances
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I don't feel lucky about that experience. And I mean, there was anger and all that. But in the meantime, the fuller context of that community was also quite a supportive community. So it was very confusing. It gave me the multidimensionality of the new country. I landed in... Everything's happening.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I always felt I had to keep my head down. Right. Especially as an immigrant, sometimes I feel that way even now, especially given the AI world we live in. I feel I need to keep my head down to do work. Of course, that particular event probably added a layer of complication, at least for a while. But it also taught me you have to stand up for yourself. It did open different insights to me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, it's possibly in the top three for sure. Meeting Mr. Sabella was so lucky for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. Mrs. Savella was my math teacher. I got into calculus and then Persepolis High School doesn't have calculus BC. We only had AP calculus for AB. So he had to teach me during his lunch hour for BC. But this story you're talking about was earlier. It was during some pre-calculus stuff and it turned out I was using a broken calculator. Oh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I might. I woke up so early.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I love garage sales. I don't have time to go to garage sales, but I love it. Mr. Sabella was tough. He is a tough love kind of teacher. Even though I was ESL, I was this mousy girl. He didn't think I needed any extra.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
No, not at all. For one quarter of semester, I got 89.4 or something. I still remember that. I was like, oh, God, 0.6. I would get to at least an A. And he would not give me that A. Uh-huh.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Probably 5.40 something. That's early. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, he would say there are many smart kids in the class. You just have to work hard.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Well, I've read everything my mom gave me, which was extensive. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Not that much later. My alarm is 6.20. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I think he saw a person he could befriend with just the way I saw in him. Later on, I realized, again, this is hindsight, that he does that to so many students. And he used this way of opening up in different ways, not necessarily science fiction or classic literature, to really get to be so helpful.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
For him and me, beyond math and calculator, when we started talking about science fiction and the English classics, he realized that he was seeing me more than an ESL kid at that point. And he's also a shy person himself. Later, his wife, Jean, and Bob, later I call him Bob, we became such good friends. Many, many years, way longer than maybe. Jean said he's such a bookworm.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Even during his family parties, he'll be by himself reading. Yeah. So he's totally an introvert in a way that we just had chemistry.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
But this is one thing I was not able to fit into the book is that for years, he would keep a diary. And his diary talks about just his teaching life. And I know in this diary, there are so many stories about different students he helped with, not in the sense of bragging. It's just he's a writer, right? Yeah. So years later, before he passed away, we didn't know he was going to pass away.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I told Bob, I said, Bob, you've got to turn this into a book. Of course, we could anonymize, but this is an American teacher's story of suicide. So many students, many of them are immigrant students because they lack the support. They lack the family. Some of them are in high school by themselves. Family is overseas. Many of them are like me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Mine is eight and 12. You have eight and 12. Yeah, so we're in the same stage of life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Parents are so busy that the students don't have that emotional support. And he supported so many students. I can sit here and tell you endless story. And then he wanted to translate that into a book, but somehow he just couldn't bring himself to do it. Maybe he's too shy. Maybe he's too humble.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. I feel so strongly he needed to write this book. I almost felt like one day I would write it for him. But of course... He passed away so suddenly because of the brain tumor. So when I was writing my book, I realized, let me tell the Bob Sabella story. Let me tell the story on behalf of so many American public school teachers. They don't have much of a voice.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
12 is boy, eight is a girl. How about you?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Nobody knows their name, but they work above and beyond every day for the students in their community. They don't care which part of the world they come from, which kind of family background they come from. But they invested so much in these students and they changed lives.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
They're totally unsung heroes.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He was instrumental more than Princeton because he was instrumental as the second dad. He helped me to be grounded. When you're an immigrant kid, an ESL kid, you land in the country without speaking the language and going through so many things. It feels so unstable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So the first time I saw the statue of Albert Einstein, before I was applying for college, it was probably early junior year. My dad continued to find things for us to do that's free. It's very important. It's free. Princeton's Natural History Museum was free.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Museums, free. Yes. Seeing Einstein's statue was kind of symbolic for me that I'm getting back to where really my soul wanted to be at. Because as a teenager, landed in a new country, trying to learn language, deal with all the messiness, you know, Chinese restaurant, walking dogs.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, exactly. I didn't forget about physics. I was taking physics class in school, but I forget about the sense of love.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes, it really is that first love. And it kind of got me back to that, rekindled something.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. Suddenly I feel so much closer to that person. And that person symbolizes the entire world of physics. I feel so much closer. I was literally in Princeton. Yeah, yeah. That felt very different.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I'm sure you watched the movie Oppenheimer.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Do you remember the opening scene was Einstein in front of that little pond?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. He was first there by himself. Yeah. I call that my pond. That pond literally exists. It was very close to my dorm by the time I got to Princeton. And I would go there a lot because I know that was close to the Advanced Institute where Einstein worked. Yeah. So like when the scene came out, Sylvia was sitting next to it. I'm like, Sylvia, this is my pond.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I'm reading a different bio of him, but not The Maniac.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Oh, it's in my phone. Yeah, same. Don't worry about it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Another Princeton guy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah. Physics is absolutely the discipline that pushes you to think so audaciously that you have to transcend the immediate reality.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
That's what I loved. I loved about Einstein. I loved about modern physics, even Newton, classic physics. You have to think so beyond the immediate reality.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
There is actually even beyond math.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I love that you call it magic. It is also the furthest thing we have to AI is that humanity in us, that magic, that creativity, that intuition, that almost ungraspable way of intelligence. Yes. We should keep that in mind.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So we started very quickly right after my freshman year started because my mom's health was going so badly. They were working in Newark, New Jersey. I don't know if you guys know that part. Newark, New Jersey. From Persephone to Newark, New Jersey is a very difficult drive. My mom's health was bad and it was long working hours. I was really worried about them. Doctor was worried.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
We finally decided if we can do a local thing in Persephone, it'll be better for the family. And it was very important for me that the business is a weekend business because that way I can do the lion's share of work. But there are pretty much three kinds of weekend business for immigration families like us. Open a restaurant, open a grocery store, or open a laundry.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And restaurant and grocery require very late working hours for restaurant. And grocery is very early. You have to go to Chinatown to get supplies. So neither of these work for my mom's health. Whereas dry cleaning was actually perfect because it's a daytime business. It's very long hours during the weekend, but it's at least daytime.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And a lot of my mom's work, especially when it comes to alteration, she can sit in front of the sewing machine.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes, she carried that illness with her all her life.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I mean, there's no money in any of this. But having that tailoring ability was nice because it helps a little bit. And my mom is incredible. She never learned this. She was a bookworm and she's kind of a brainy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. Yeah. I don't think she would love physics. But you know what I mean? She should have probably been an academic. Yes. She would have been an academic. But then she just kind of figured out tailoring by herself. I still don't know. Like, I tried. I could not. The only thing I can do is sit there and unstitch things for her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, so we opened a dry cleaner shop during the middle of my freshman year. And that became my entire memory of my undergraduate. Here's a fun fact. Princeton is organized by residential dorms. I lived in one of them called Forbes. It turned out Forbes is very famous for its Sunday brunch. I didn't know there was a Sunday brunch. because I was home doing dry cleaning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. But then when I went back to Princeton as a faculty, Forbes was very kind. They made me a faculty fellow. And I discovered Sunday Brothers. 50 years later.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So I felt so good. I finally got my Sunday brunch.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, it was a total shock. To this day, actually, as a 19-year-old, as much as I appreciated Gene and Bob, I did not realize the extent. We're talking about late 1990s. There are two public school teachers with two kids about to go to college. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He said Jing and he decided to do that. I mean, at that moment, I was very, very grateful. But now after I became a grown up, this is unimaginable.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Especially he later told me, I think when I was returning the money, he said, I didn't realize you'll be able to return. Right.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I did not know that. He did use the word lend. And of course, in my mind, I was like, of course, I'm going to return. Like, I'll do anything to return. But Jing and Bob did not expect that. They could not have assumed that. So the money was being raised to help your mom? No, to help my family. To start the business. Yeah. We as a family, I still consider myself the CEO of the dry cleaner. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I live in Silicon Valley. You have to claim yourself to be a CEO of something. Yeah, exactly. Bob and Jean. It's incredible. I don't even think their kids knew about this till they read my book. Wow.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, so Princeton is a quirky school. It didn't have minors. So it has these certificates, but they're just minors. I had a computational mathematics as well as an engineering physics minors.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. He just texted me last night. He's like, you're seeing my friend, Dax. Oh, good.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It's actually really interesting. I never necessarily thought I would be a physicist, but I wanted to be a scientist. That was almost a sacred calling for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It was an identity. For some reason, this girl who works in dry cleaners just wanted to be a scientist. And then I loved physics. But I loved physics for its audacity and curiosity. I didn't necessarily feel I'm married to a big telescope inquiry. So I was just reading a lot. And what really caught my attention was the physicist's I admired so much Einstein, Schrodinger, Roger Penrose.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
They actually are curious beyond just atomic world. They were curious about other things, especially life, intelligence, minds. And that was immediately the no point and the eye opener for me. I realized I love that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. But for me, it was the science of intelligence. I always believed it's the science of intelligence that will unite our understanding of both the brain and the computers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I know we're 15 minutes away from Caltech here, 20 minutes. So I was choosing among MIT, Stanford, and Caltech. And honest to God, I almost chose Caltech because of the weather. Yeah, that's fair. It was so balmy. And the vibe. Yes, the turtles, the garden-like campus. And of course, I walk into this building. I think it was Moore Building at Caltech. And guess whose photo was there?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It was Albert Einstein. And I was like, what? It turned out he was visiting. And of course, there was Richard Feynman, the Feynman Lecture. So I just followed these physicists, apparently. And New Jersey was cold. And also, I really have an issue with cold because my mom's illness is exacerbated by cold. So every winter, she suffers a lot.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So I have this negative affinity to coldness coming from taking care of my mom. So coming to Southern California, I was like, oh my God, I love this place. Did your parents come with you? Later they did. In the middle of my grad school, they did. Were you worried about that, leaving? I had to switch from being on site to remotely run the dry cleaning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
The dry cleaning was stabilized that the customers are all returning customers. So my mom would be able to handle with one part-time worker. And Bob Sabella was doing bills for my mom. Oh my God. Yeah. He was just helping me. And another thing he helped me as a young graduate student, I would be entering the world of writing scientific articles. That's pretty intense.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He would still proofread my English for me, all my papers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. The prelude of the North Star was my education from physics is always about asking the right questions. If you go to the Nobel Museum in Stockholm, there is an Einstein quote about much of science is asking the right questions. Once you ask the right questions, solutions follow. You'll find a way for solutions. Some people call it hypothesis driven thinking.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I've always been just thinking this way. So as I was studying computational neuroscience, as well as artificial intelligence at Caltech, I was always kind of seeking what is that audacious question I wanted to ask. And of course, my co-advisor Pietro Perona and Christophe Koch, they were great mentors guiding me. But many things start to converge, not just my own work, but the field.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
People working on visual intelligence from neuroscience, from AI, start to orbit around this idea that the ability to recognize things all kinds of objects is so critical for human visual intelligence. When I say all kinds of objects, I really mean all kinds. I'm sitting here in your beautiful room. There's table, bottles, couch, pillow, a globe, books, flower, vase, plants.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Thank you. I do want to give credit to my friend, Alex, who co-wrote the book with me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Okay, that's behind you. That's behind you. It's about to eat you. Shirts and skirts and boots and TV. So the ability for humans to be able to learn such a complicated world of objects.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It's so fascinating, and I started to believe, along with my advisors, this is a critical problem for the foundation of intelligence. And that really started to become the North Star of my scientific pursuit, is how do we crack the problem of object recognition?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. So that's the parallel story I was writing the book about.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Alex is a friend of mine. He does not claim to be a writer, but he's a very talented writer. And we've known each other for years, and he loves AI, and we talk about it. So when I was invited to write this book, I do feel like I want Alex to co-create this with me. So we became a creative team. It was a really fun process.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. Well, the field of computing, thanks to people like Alan Turing von Neumann, was starting during World War II time, basically. Of course, for the The world of AI, a very important moment was 1956, when what we now call the founding fathers of AI, like Marvin Minsky, John McCarthy, Claude Shannon, they get together under, I believe, a U.S. government grant.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
DARPA funded to have a summer-long workshop at Dartmouth with a group of computer scientists. At that point, the field of AI was barely kind of boring, not boring yet. They got together and wrote this memo or this white paper about artificial intelligence. In fact, John McCarthy, one of the group leaders, was responsible for coining the term artificial intelligence. Okay.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It could calculate.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. Up to that point, you can think no matter how powerful the computer was, it was used for programmed calculation. So what was the inflection concept? I think two intertwined concepts. One is reasoning. Like you said, if I ask you a question, can you reason with it? Could you deduce if a red ball is bigger than a yellow ball, a yellow ball is bigger than a blue ball.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Therefore, the red ball must be bigger than the blue ball.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Without directly saying red ball is bigger than the blue ball. So that's a reasoning. So that's one aspect. A very, very intertwined aspect of that is learning. A calculator doesn't learn whether you have a good 10 button or not. It just does what it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Once I had a bad one. So artificial intelligence software should be able to learn. That means if I learn to see tiger one, tiger two, tiger three, at some point when someone gives me tiger number five, I should be able to learn, oh, that's a tiger, even though that's not tiger one, two, three. Right. So that's learning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
But even before the Dartmouth workshop, there were early inklings, like Alan Turing's daring question to humanity, can you make a machine that can converse with people, QA with people, question and answer, so that you don't really know if it's a machine or a person. It's this curtain setup that he conjectured. Yeah.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So it was already there, but I think the founding fathers kind of formalized the field. Of course, what's interesting is for the first few decades, they went straight to reasoning. So they were less about learning. They were more about reasoning. They were more about using logic to deduce the red ball, yellow ball, blue ball question.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So that was one branch of computer science and AI that went on during the years, predated my birth, but during the years of my formative years, without me knowing, I wasn't in there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I know Alex through TED. 2015, I gave my first TED Talk.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
But there was a parallel branch. That branch was messier. It took longer to prove to be right. But as of last week, we had the Nobel Prize awarded to that, which was the neural network. So that happened again in a very interesting way. Even in the 50s, neuroscientists were asking questions, nothing to do with AI, about how neurons work.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And again, my own field, vision, was the pioneering study about cat mammalian visual system. And Hubel and Wiesel in the 1950s and 60s were sticking electrodes into cat's visual cortex to learn about how cat neurons work. Details aside, what they have learned and confirmed was a conjecture that our brain or mammalian brain is filled with neurons that are organized hierarchically.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
They're not like thrown into a salad bowl. Right. Okay. And that means information travel in a hierarchical way.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. For example, light hits our retina. Our retina sends neural information back to our primary cortex. Our primary cortex processes it, sends it up to... to, say, another layer, and then it keeps going up. And as the information travels, the neurons process this information in somewhat different ways. And that hierarchical processing gets you to complex intelligent capabilities.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes, and that's how I got to know Alex.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Or this tiger sneaking up on me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. And how did evolution assemble us so that we can recognize all this beautiful world? Not only we can recognize, we can reason with it. We can learn from it. Many scientists have used this example is that children don't have to see too many examples of a tiger to recognize a tiger. It's not like you have to show a million tigers to children. So we learn really fast.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I think so, yeah. He was in some kind of partnership with Ted and he was helping me to put together my slides. Since then, we've become friends and we talk about AI and he's also helped me in some of the Stanford HAI, Human-Centered AI Institute stuff.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Exactly. So just to finish, so the neuroscientists were studying the structure of the mammalian brain and how that visual information was processed. Fast forward, that study got the Nobel Prize in the 1980s because it's such a fundamental discovery. But that inspired computer scientists.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So there is a separate small group of computer scientists who are starting to build algorithms inspired by this hierarchical information processing architecture.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
No, it's a whole algorithm, but you build mathematical functions that are layered.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So you can have one small function that process brightness, another that process curvature. I'm being schematic. And then you process the information. But what was really interesting of this approach is that in the early 80s, this neural network approach found a learning rule. So suddenly it unlocked how to learn this automatically without hand code. It's called backpropagation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And also Jeff Hinton, along with others who have discovered this, was awarded the Nobel Prize last week for this. But that is the algorithm neural network.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
You could actually.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
You just keep filtering it. Of course, you combine it in mathematically very intricate way, but it is like layers of filtration a little bit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
for linguistics. So WordLab had nothing to do with AI. It had nothing to do with vision. But what happened for my own North Star is that I was obsessed with the problem of making computers recognize millions of objects in the world. Why I was obsessing with it. I was not satisfied because my field was using extremely contrived data sets, like data set of four objects or 20 objects.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. It's very interesting because book writing is a very different creation compared to doing science. We wrote almost three years or two and a half of those years. During the day, I do my science and some of the evenings I do the creative writing. It's such a different part of the brain.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I was really struggling with this discrepancy because my hypothesis was that we need to learn the much more complex world. We need to solve that deeper problem than focusing on a very handful of objects. But I couldn't really wrap my head around that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And then again, Southern California, I remember that Biederman number in my book is that I read a psychologist paper, Irv Biederman, who was up till two years ago, a professor at University of Southern California. He conjectured that humans can recognize tens of thousands of object categories. So we can recognize millions of objects, but categories are a little more abstract.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, sedan, fighter jet, and all that. So he conjectured that, but that conjecture didn't go anywhere. It was just buried in one of his papers, and I dug it out, and I was very fascinated. I called it the Biedermann number because I thought that number was meaningful, but I don't know how to translate that into anything actionable because...
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
As a computer scientist, we're all using data sets of 20 objects. That's it. And then I stumbled upon WordNet. What WordNet was, was a completely independent study from the world of linguistics. It was George Miller, a linguist in Princeton.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He was trying to organize taxonomy of concepts, and he feels alphabetically organized dictionary was unsatisfactory because in dictionary, an apple and an appliance would be close to each other, but that apple should be closer to a pear. Oh, I see. Then appliance. So how do you organize that? How do you regroup concepts?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So he created WordNet, which hierarchically organized concept according to meaning and similarity rather than alphabetical ordering.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
That was ConvNet, Convolutional Neural Network.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So that was Young-Kung's work in Bell Labs. That was an early application of neural network in the 1980s and 1990s, where that neural network at that time was not very powerful, but But giving enough training example of digits, the scientists in Bell Labs were able to read from zero to nine or the 26 letters. And with that, they created an application to read zip codes to sort mail.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It was a lot of handwritten digits.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
That data set was probably tens of thousands of examples, but we're talking about just letters and digits.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
No, but they are very different. Of course, I've been a scientist for almost three decades, so I'm more familiar with being a scientist. But the creative writing journey, I loved every minute of it. When I say I love, it's not necessarily happy love. It's a painful, lovesome part of it. But I really loved it.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So I think what you were referring to was the process of making ImageNet, right?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And that process was once we realized, thanks to the inspiration of WordNet and also Biedermann's number and also many other previous inspiration, we realized what computers really need is big data. And that was so common today because everybody talks about big data, you know, OpenAI talks about big data. But back in 2006, 2006, 2007, that was not a concept.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
But we decided that was the missing piece. So we need to create a big data set. How big is big? Nobody knows. My conjecture went with Biederman's number. Why don't we just map out the entire world's visual concept? Oh, my God.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Okay. So Professor Kai Li at Princeton, he was very supportive of me. He was a senior faculty. But what was really critical was he recommended his student to join my lab, Jia Deng. And Jia was just a deer in the headlight as a young first-year graduate student. He didn't know what's going on. He got this crazy assistant professor of me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
and told him that we're going to create a data set that map out the whole world's visual concept. He's like, sure. You know, I don't know what you're talking about, but let's get started. So he and I went through the journey together. I mean, he's a phenomenal computer scientist and many hoops we jumped through together. It was just the solution that got us through.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
That's an interesting observation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I do tell my kids ideas are cheap. Exactly. Hollywood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, I'll start with this room and write everything. Well, okay. So first of all, I've had years of training as a scientist. So after you formulate a hypothesis, you do have to come up with a plan. My PhD thesis had a mini version of ImageDesk. So I got a little bit of practice. But yeah, our idea was to create a data set and a benchmark to encompass all the visual concepts in the world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So we had to start with WordNet. We had to figure out what is visual. We have to figure out what are the concepts we need and then where to get the source images and how to curate it. Every step of the way, like Dax, you were saying, we were just way too optimistic at the beginning.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, I was just fearlessly stupid.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And then we start to hit all these walls of Jia and I and other students. But Jia was the main student. We had to just deal with every obstacle that came. Now, science is a funny thing, right? Sometimes serendipity makes a world of difference. What was really critical was the Amazon Mechanical Turk, the crowdsourcing platform. Amazon, nothing to do with us.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
We're like, oh, we have all these servers sitting in our data centers and we have nothing better to do. Let's make an online worker platform so people can just trade little tasks.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Exactly. Which I didn't know it exists. I was in New Jersey, Princeton and trying to pull my hair out. And then some student who did his master at Stanford came to Princeton and just mentioned it casually and said, do you know this thing? That was really, really quite a moment for me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, 10x. That was one of the technical breakthrough that really carried this whole project.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
No, and I didn't want to and I still don't.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Not only years and years, the budget. Hiring undergrads or whatever just doesn't cut it. The budget was not going to cut it. My tenure was on the line. It was a dicey few moments.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes, I did go rogue a little bit.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So it's very important to call out the year. My sabbatical at Google was 2017 and 2018. That was my first sabbatical. I finally had a sabbatical. And it was a conscious decision for me to go to Google because this is right after AlphaGo. So AI was having its first hype wave, at least public moment. And Silicon Valley, of course, was ahead of the curve and new AI was coming.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So I had multiple choices, but I really wanted to go to a place for two reasons. One is to learn the most advanced industry AI, and Google was by far the best. But also to go to a place where I can see how AI will impact the world. And Google Cloud was a perfect place because cloud business is serving all businesses.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So at Cloud, being the chief scientist, I was able to see the technology translating to product and product impacting healthcare, hospitals, financial services, insurance companies, oil and gas companies, entertainment, agriculture, governments, and all that. But in the meantime, it was confirming my hypothesis that this technology has come of age and will impact everyone.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It was the first tech clash. 2017 was right after Cambridge Analytica.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, social media's algorithmic impact can drive societal changes. It was also around the time face recognition bias was being publicized for the good reasons of calling out bias. So before that, tech was a darling. The media doesn't report tech as a force of badness.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Well, I have to say, I think culture in the case of an individual sometimes is too broad a brushstroke. I think it's more individual. I'm a relatively shy person. And Alex and I wrote the first version. It was purely scientific. It was the first year of COVID. We talk on the phone almost every night. And one of my best friend is a philosopher at Stanford called John H. Mindy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
That's true. Hollywood is always ahead of the curve on that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So it was a tech clash that came at us very fast. Google has had its own share. I was actually also witnessing the struggle that Google was coming to terms with defense issues.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes. In hindsight, it was a mixture of many things. It wasn't a single event. I remember it was summer of 2018 and we were just coming off this turmoil. In hindsight, they're small, but at that point, And I was just like, I'm about to speak to maybe my memory is wrong, but I thought it was 700 interns from worldwide who worked at Google that summer. And they're the brightest from the whole world.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And they were hand selected by Google. You know, Google is really a machine of talent. And what do they want to hear from me? Of course, I can talk about come work at Google. That's my job as someone who was working at Google. But I felt there was more I should share.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Really coming from the bottom of my heart at that point, something that you will appreciate is that the math behind technology is clean, but the human impact is messy. Technology is... so much more multidimensional than equations.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
But once they start to interface with the world, the impact is not necessarily neutral at all. And there is so much humanness in everything we do in technology. And how do we connect that? I decided to talk about that with the interns.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, it was around that time, 2018 March, I published the New York Times op-ed. I laid out my vision for human-centered AI.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
My overarching thesis is that we must center the value of technologies, development, deployment, and governance around people. Any technology, AI or any other technology, should be human-centered. As I always say, that there's no independent machine values. Machine values are human values. Or there's nothing artificial about artificial intelligence. So it's deeply human.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So human-centered AI should be a framework, and that framework could be applied in fundamental research and education. That's what Stanford does. or creating business and products, as Google and many other companies do, or in the legislation and governance of AI, which is what governments do. So that framework can be translated into multiple ways.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Fundamentally, it is to put humans' dignity, humans' well-being, and the value that a society care about into both how you create AI or how you create AI products and services or how you govern AI. So concrete examples, let me start from the very basic size upstream. At Stanford, we created this Human-Centered AI Institute. We try to encourage cross-pollinating interdisciplinary research
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He's a very revered higher education leader. He was Stanford's provost for 17 years. And he is co-director with me at Stanford Human Center Institute. So I was really proud I wrote this first draft. I showed it to him. It was during COVID. After like two weeks, he called me. He said, Feifei, you and Alex should come to my backyard. That's how we meet because we were social distancing.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
study and research and teaching about different aspects of AI, like AI for drug discovery, AI for developmental studies, or AI for economics and all that. But we also need to keep in mind, we need to do this with the kind of norm that reflect our values. So we have actually a review process of our grants.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
We call it ethics and society review process, where even when researchers are proposing a research idea to receive funding from HAI, they have to go through a study or a review about what is the social implication? What is the ethical framework?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
That's the very fundamental research example. Now, translate to a company. When we think about an AI product, let's say I would love for AI to detect skin condition for diseases. That's a great idea. But starting from your data, where do you curate data? How do you ensure data fairness?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Exactly. What about the scan of the face? And also the algorithm that detects melanoma, is it trained on... Just white folks? Right, exactly. Narrow type of skin or all skins? What's the impact of that algorithm?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So all those are messy human elements. And then you ask about legislation. Then we come to government. Of course. There is always a tension between how much regulation, how do you regulate? Is good policy only about regulating? For example, I firmly believe we actually should have good policy to rejuvenate our AI ecosystem, to make our AI ecosystem really healthy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
For example, right now, the gravitational pull is that all the resources that The data, the computation and the talents are all concentrated in a small number of large companies. It's all for commerce.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
My own lab at Stanford has zero NVIDIA H100 chips. There you go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And it's not just competition. It's that the problems we work on are curiosity driven and sometimes they are really public good. For example, my own lab, we're collaborating with hospitals to prevent seniors from falling. That is not necessarily a commercially lucrative technology, but it's humanistically important. And universities do all kinds of work like that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Now our universities in the age of AI is so under-resourced that we cannot do this kind of work. I have been working really hard in the past five years with HAI, with Washington, D.C., with Congress people, senators, White House agencies to try to encourage the resourcing of AI through National AI Research Cloud and data. And then we have legislation and regulation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
How do you thoughtfully put guardrails so that individual lives and dignity and well-being are protected, but the ecosystem is not harmed?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
And then we went and he said, you have to rewrite. I was like, what? That's the last thing I want to do here. He said, you're missing an opportunity to tell your story, tell AI story through your lens. And I was just so rejecting that idea. I was like, who? wants to hear my story. I want to write about AI. I call him Edge.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I was also chatting with Yuval. Did he give the C minus grade to humanity? Did he say that?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He said that humanity has gotten a C minus. And I was like, Yuval, you know, I'm a teacher and a mom. When a kid comes home with C minus, you don't throw the kid out. We help the kid to get better. So first of all, you're right. We're not living in a vacuum. And AI also is not living in a vacuum. AI is just one technology that's among many. So I absolutely do believe that there can be cooperation.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
How exactly we cooperate, who we cooperate with, and what are the parameters of cooperation is much, much more complicated. Look at humanity. We have gone through this so many times. I mean, you're always right. We have many messy chapters, even nuclear technology. But we have gotten to a state that there is a fine balance at this point of nuclear powers.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I'm not saying that's necessarily comparable. I think it is.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Here's the The difference between AI and nuclear technology is AI is so much more an enabler of so many good things. True. So that's very different from nuclear. Of course, nuclear can be an energy.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. But AI can help discover drugs. AI can help break through infusion. AI can personalize education. AI can help farmers. AI can map out biodiversity. So AI is much more like electricity than it is like nuclear physics. So that's the difference.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
So from that point of view, the viewing angle of AI, at least I do not think it has to only from the competitive lens because it should be also through the enabling lens, the enabling of our world, of so many good things that can happen. And that's the challenge is how do we keep the dark use of AI at bay? How do we create that kind of
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Edge said, there are many AI scientists who can write a so-called quote-unquote objective story of AI, but your angle would be so meaningful, your voice to the young people out there, the young women, immigrants, people of all kind of backgrounds. And we were sitting in his backyard with a triangular shape, three chairs. And I looked at Alex. He was almost jumping off his chair. With excitement.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
balance somehow, but in the meantime, encourage the development of AI so that we can do so many things that's good for people.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I do think we must always recognize cooperation is one of the solutions.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I do think we should pay a lot of attention on where rubber meets the road. Because AI can sound very fancy, but at the end of the day, it impacts people. So if you use AI through medicine, then there is a regulatory framework. For example, my mom, again, does imaging all the time because the doctors have to use MRI, ultrasound, you name it, to monitor her.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Honestly, do I care if that MRI is fully automatic or is it operated by humans or it's a mixture? As a patient family, I probably care more about the outcome. If the result of the MRI can be so accurate,
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Exactly. But all I care are two things. One is it is the best result my mom can get. Second is it's safe, right? I don't care if it's that kind of mixture. So that regulatory framework is there. I'm not saying FDA is perfect, but it is a functioning regulatory framework. So if there is an AI product that goes into the MRI, I would like it to be subject to the regulatory framework. There we go.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, yeah. Right. So that's where rubber meets the road. The same as finance, environment, transportation, you name it. That's a very pragmatic approach. It's also urgent because as we have AI products that's entering our customers' market, And it takes away from, in my opinion, the science fiction rhetoric about existential crisis, machine overlord. That can stay with Hollywood.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I believe the downstream application is where we should put our guardrail attention at.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He said, I told you. He said, I told you so many times. Of course, it only takes Edge to tell you that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
That's very sweet. That's the problem of always chasing after North Star. I try to like look forward. One thing I do reflect back is how grateful I am. I'm not here by myself. I'm here because of the Bob Sabella, Gene Sabella, the advisors, the students, the colleagues. That I feel very, very lucky.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
A little bit. I didn't finish the audio part.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I'm like, do I have time? I should finish my Von Neumann book.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, you got a couple new books to read. I'm so great. You like the book.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I felt a little self-conscious because of my accent.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Because I consider if I should narrate my own book, but I feel like my accent is probably too strong for that.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Right. And that's how many hundred pages? You also probably need to put your time there.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Thank you. It's so important. And I do think creators and creators' voices are so important because we started this conversation with what's different from human intelligence, AI, and that creativity, the insight is a huge part of it. And now that we have the generative AI trying to create things, I think the collaboration with humans is so important.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It's very subtle you caught that because when I go into the world of science, I don't think too much about many other things. I just follow that light, follow the curiosity. And to this day, even when I was writing the book, it's AI that fascinates me and I wanted to write about AI. So it was very strange that someone wants to read about science. Me.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes, but I do want to be honest, even when I was a young kid in China, I loved math and physics. I love physics, I would say even more than math itself. I saw math more as a tool. I saw more beauty and fascination in physics.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
She is very interesting. My mom come from a normal family. But as the book says, our family is in a difficult position because of the history. So she was a very good student. I think the intellectual intensity I have, a large part of it come from my mom. She was a curious student. She was very intense.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
But her dream was pretty shattered when she was not able to go to a normal high school when she had a dream for college. And that carried her through.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
A lot of this is hindsight because I didn't talk to my mom in this way, right? I think it was a combination that my mom has her own longing to be more free, maybe. And in hindsight, I don't know if she knew how to translate that in the world she was living in. And the opportunity to go to a new world was as appetizing to her as it is for her on my behalf.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It's also true she saw me as a bit of a quirky kid. I think that blend of what she was longing for and what she was longing for on my behalf without me realizing was the motivation of many of the changes, the decision of immigration.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
My mom was not looking for attention for me. My mom was looking for freedom for me. And for herself, a lot of that is projection, was looking for a world where I can just be who I am. She wasn't necessarily looking for attention. What do you mean by quirky? This goes to my dad. I didn't follow rules in the average way. In hindsight, maybe it was just me being immature.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
But also there is a part of me, why should girls not play soccer? Why should girls be told they are biologically less smart than boys? I was told at least more than once, watch out that girls will in general be less smart by the time you hit your teenage time.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I wasn't told in the context of one-one, like, let me sit you down, Feifei, and tell you. I was told in the way that teachers will say things to boys.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Or the context. Society had a whole different expectation for boys. I was very lucky my own family protected me, but they can only protect me so much. As soon as you enter a school system, as soon as you interact with society, all that came through. From that point of view, I was not following the normal path. I was reading different books.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
I was so passionate about flights, UFOs, physics, special relativity. I would grab my classmates to talk about that, but that was just not normal.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Great question. I was trying to ask myself that question when I was writing the book, and I still don't have a strong answer. I think the early curiosity, the exposure came from both my parents. My dad loved nature. My mom loved books and literature. But how did I fell in love with physics and UFOs and all that? I'm not totally sure. It could be my dad before he came to New Jersey.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
He was ordering me some magazines outside of the school reading. And that exposed me to those topics. And because my parents protected my curiosity, when I say protected, it really just meant they left it alone. They didn't meddle with it. I kind of followed it through myself.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
It was tough. I mean, it was early teenagehood. There was no internet. Phone calls are extremely expensive to the point of being prohibitively expensive. So it was mostly letters every couple of months. But then I was a teenager, so I had my own world to explore as well. So it wasn't like I was sitting in the room crying or anything.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Persephone High School.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
A group of ESL students were in the library and then the bell rang or something. We have to file out of the library door. And I remember it was crowded. I honestly did not see what happened to that boy. But all I knew was my ESL teacher.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yeah, I mean, nobody would be the same after going through something like that. Definitely, it's a huge impact. It was an experience that was definitely pretty intense for all ESL students. Nobody felt safe for a long while.
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
You want to swap? You want to sit in this chair?
Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard
Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI)
Yes, but also I do want to give more colors, right? I love that your show focuses on the messiness of being human. Being messy is being multidimensional. But it was also an environment where there was so much support. There was so much friendliness there. And there was also so much opportunity. So it was very confusing. I'm not trying to say that experience itself is not heavy.