Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford University professor renowned for her ImageNet research and hailed as the "Godmother of AI," founded a research platform that was only one year old.AI startup World LabsIts valuation recently surpassed $10 billion, officially joining the ranks of unicorns. However, this top scientist's starting point was not glamorous; in a recent interview...Bloomberg News interviewAt the time, Li Feifei revealed that she had worked as the "CEO" of a dry cleaning shop for seven years in order to support her family.
He immigrated to the United States at the age of 15, and managed a dry cleaning shop while studying at Princeton.
Li Feifei immigrated to the United States from China at the age of 15. At that time, her family was not well-off, with her parents working as a cashier and a restaurant worker, respectively. To make a living, the family opened a small dry cleaning shop in Parsippany, New Jersey.
Li Feifei jokingly referred to herself as the "CEO" of the store at the time. From the age of 18 when she entered Princeton University until the early days of her doctoral studies at Caltech, she assisted in running the store for a full seven years.
As the family's best English speaker, she handled everything from answering customer calls and processing bills to dealing with inspections. Even later, while pursuing her doctorate in California, she continued to remotely assist in managing the family business.
Immigration experience fosters scientific resilience
Li Feifei said that this experience taught her the importance of "resilience," which is also a key principle guiding her career.
She points out, "As a scientist, you have to be resilient because science is a non-linear journey, and as an immigrant, you also learn resilience." She considers herself to have always been a curious child, and science became an outlet for her curiosity, allowing her to focus on it rather than other forms of entertainment.
Beyond LLM, World Labs focuses on "spatial intelligence".
Returning to World Labs' technological strategy, Fei-Fei Li harbors enormous ambitions. Unlike the current mainstream large-scale language models (LLMs) based on language training, World Labs is dedicated to building "World Models".
Li Feifei emphasized the concept of "Spatial Intelligence," which refers to AI's ability to understand, perceive, reason, and interact with the world.
As more and more AI experts (including Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta who recently announced his departure to start his own business) believe that LLM has its limitations, a "world model" with the ability to understand the physical world is seen as the key to pushing the AI revolution to the next stage.
Fei-Fei Li believes that her past research on visual information in ImageNet is the precursor and foundation for achieving this goal.
