Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li is a Chinese-American computer scientist and AI researcher, born July 3, 1976 in Beijing. She is best known as the creator of ImageNet, the 2009 large-scale image dataset whose annual recognition challenge produced the 2012 AlexNet result that catalyzed the modern deep-learning era in computer vision. As of May 2026, she is the Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University (on partial leave through 2027), the founding co-director of Stanford HAI, and the co-founder and chief executive officer of World Labs, the spatial-intelligence company she launched in 2024.

At a glance

• Education: Physics at Princeton University (BA, 1999, High Honors); California Institute of Technology (MS in Electrical Engineering, 2001; PhD, 2005, under Pietro Perona).
• Current role: Sequoia Capital Professor of Computer Science at Stanford (on partial leave through August 2027); Denning Co-Director of Stanford HAI; co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of World Labs.
• Key contributions: creator of ImageNet (2007 to 2009 launch, ILSVRC competition 2010 to 2017); director of the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL, 2013 to 2018); Chief Scientist of AI and ML at Google Cloud (2017 to 2018); co-founder and chairperson of AI4ALL (2017); founding co-director of Stanford HAI (March 2019); author of "The Worlds I See" (Flatiron Books, 2023).
• X / Twitter: @drfeifei
• LinkedIn: Fei-Fei Li
• Stanford profile: profiles.stanford.edu/fei-fei-li

Origins

Li was born in Beijing in July 1976 and grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan. Her father immigrated to Parsippany, New Jersey when she was 12; she joined him at 16, learning English in high school while working in her family's dry-cleaning business. She enrolled at Princeton on a scholarship and graduated with a BA in physics in 1999, with High Honors.

She moved to Caltech for graduate study in electrical engineering, completing a master's in 2001 and a PhD in 2005 under Pietro Perona, with secondary supervision from Christof Koch. The dissertation, "Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics," introduced the "one-shot learning" research line and the Caltech 101 and Caltech 256 datasets that prefigured her later work.

After Caltech she held a brief assistant-professor appointment at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in 2005 and 2006 before moving to Princeton as an assistant professor of computer science in 2007.

Career

At Princeton, between 2007 and 2009, Li and her graduate student Jia Deng began assembling the dataset that would become ImageNet. The team applied WordNet's noun hierarchy to image categories and used Amazon Mechanical Turk to scale crowdsourced labeling. The first ImageNet paper, presented as a poster at the Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) in June 2009, described 12 million images across roughly 22,000 categories.

Li joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor of computer science, was tenured in 2012, and was promoted to full professor in 2018. From 2013 to 2018 she directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). The annual ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge launched in 2010; its 2012 edition was won decisively by AlexNet from Geoffrey Hinton's lab at Toronto, the result conventionally treated as the start of the modern deep-learning era in computer vision.

Li took public leave from Stanford in January 2017 to serve as Chief Scientist of AI and Machine Learning at Google Cloud through fall 2018. The role coincided with Google Cloud's launch of AutoML and the public-launch period of Cloud TPUs.

She returned to Stanford in late 2018, and in March 2019 the university launched the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (Stanford HAI) with Li and former Stanford Provost John Etchemendy as founding Denning Co-Directors. The institute coordinates more than 200 affiliated Stanford faculty and is a principal academic locus of US AI policy engagement.

In May 2020 Li was appointed to Twitter's board of directors as an independent director. She served until October 27, 2022, when she and the rest of the nine-member board were removed following Elon Musk's acquisition. In November 2023 Flatiron Books published her memoir "The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI," combining an immigrant-family narrative with a first-person history of the computer-vision research that defined the deep-learning era.

In early 2024 Li announced World Labs, a San Francisco company pursuing "spatial intelligence," AI systems that understand, generate, and reason about three-dimensional environments rather than the two-dimensional text and image data dominant in large-language and image-generation models. Co-founders include Justin Johnson (a former Stanford PhD student of Li's, on leave from the University of Michigan), Christoph Lassner (formerly Meta Reality Labs Research), and Ben Mildenhall (formerly Google; co-author of the NeRF paper). World Labs raised a $230 million seed at a $1 billion-class valuation in September 2024 and a $1 billion strategic round at an undisclosed substantially higher valuation in February 2026, with Autodesk contributing $200 million as a strategic anchor. The first commercial product, Marble, generates and edits persistent 3D environments from text, images, video, or 3D layouts.

Affiliations

• Caltech: Electrical Engineering PhD student (under Pietro Perona), 2001 to 2005
• Princeton University: Computer Science Assistant Professor, 2007 to 2009
• Stanford University: Computer Science Professor, 2009 to present
• Google Cloud: Chief Scientist of AI and Machine Learning, 2017 to 2018
• Stanford HAI / CRFM: Denning Co-Director, 2019-03 to present
• World Labs: Chief Executive Officer, 2024 to present

Notable contributions

• ImageNet (2007 to 2009 onward). The 12-million-image hierarchical dataset built at Princeton and Stanford, presented at CVPR 2009, that supplied training data for the modern computer-vision era. The associated ILSVRC competition (2010 to 2017) produced the 2012 AlexNet entry from Geoffrey Hinton's group, the canonical "deep-learning revolution" moment. Li's 2015 TED talk, "How we're teaching computers to understand pictures", is the most-cited public account of the ImageNet research program.
• AI4ALL (co-founded 2017; precursor SAILORS program founded 2015 with Olga Russakovsky and Rick Sommer at Stanford). National nonprofit broadening access to AI education for high-school students from underrepresented backgrounds; Li serves as chairperson of the board.
• Stanford HAI (co-founded March 2019 with John Etchemendy). The principal interdisciplinary AI research institute at Stanford, with research output spanning foundation-model evaluation (HELM), open-research artifacts (Alpaca), AI policy, and the AI Index annual report. Li's "Introduction to Stanford HAI" keynote sets out the institute's founding thesis.
• SAIL directorship (2013 to 2018). Li directed Stanford AI Lab through the period when modern deep learning rebuilt the lab's research portfolio.
• World Labs and the spatial-intelligence thesis (2024 onward). The "AI for 3D space" research direction articulated in Li's 2023 memoir, now operationalized as a commercial program with the Marble product line.
• "The Worlds I See" (Flatiron Books, November 2023). Memoir and first-person history of the ImageNet research program, the founding of HAI, and the spatial-intelligence direction that became World Labs.
• Public commentary on AI policy and ethics. Li has been a regular voice on US federal AI policy through HAI engagements, congressional testimony, and the AI Index report.

Investments and boards

The entries below are limited to AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, and energy.

• World Labs (AI): Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, 2024. $230 million seed at a $1 billion-class valuation, September 2024 (Andreessen Horowitz, Radical Ventures, NEA leads); $1 billion strategic round at an undisclosed substantially higher valuation, February 2026, with Autodesk contributing $200 million as strategic anchor.
• Stanford HAI / CRFM (AI): Denning Co-Director, 2019 to present. Founding co-director; shared role with John Etchemendy.
• AI4ALL (AI): Co-founder and Chairperson, 2017 to present. National nonprofit broadening access to AI education.
• Twitter (Software): Independent Director, 2020 to 2022. Appointed May 2020; removed October 27, 2022 with the rest of the nine-member board following Elon Musk's acquisition.
• Google Cloud (AI / Software): Chief Scientist of AI and Machine Learning, 2017 to 2018. Public leave from Stanford; led the Google Cloud AI and ML research and product organization.

No personal angel investments in AI, semiconductors, datacenters, software, or energy companies have been publicly disclosed as of May 2026.

Network

Li's longest-running professional relationship is with Pietro Perona, her Caltech PhD advisor. At Stanford, Andrej Karpathy was her PhD student (2011 to 2015) and CS231n co-instructor; Justin Johnson was a subsequent PhD student and is now a World Labs co-founder, making Johnson her primary current commercial collaborator. Olga Russakovsky was a PhD student during the ImageNet years and a co-founder of AI4ALL. Inside HAI, John Etchemendy is her institute co-director, and Christopher Manning, Russ Altman, and Erik Brynjolfsson are senior peers. Her husband, Silvio Savarese, is a Stanford computer-science professor (on leave) and chief scientist of Salesforce AI Research.

Position in the field

Li is unusual among senior AI researchers in that her reputation rests on three distinct kinds of work at once: a landmark research artifact (ImageNet), an academic-institute and policy footprint (Stanford HAI, the AI Index, congressional testimony), and a current operating role as founder and chief executive of a commercial AI lab (World Labs).

The popular-press shorthand "godmother of AI" has been applied to her in technology media since the 2017 to 2018 Google Cloud period. She was elected to the National Academy of Engineering and the National Academy of Medicine in 2020, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021, and named an ACM Fellow in 2018. She received the IEEE PAMI Longuet-Higgins Prize in 2019 (the "test of time" award in computer vision), the VinFuture Prize in 2024, and was named to TIME's first "100 Most Influential People in AI" list in 2023.

World Labs's commercial position is anchored by the early commercial product (Marble) and the dedicated focus on 3D scene generation. Comparable research programs include Google DeepMind's Genie family, Meta's JEPA work from Yann LeCun's group, and the parallel direction at LeCun's new venture AMI Labs; industry coverage has described World Labs as the first dedicated commercial spatial-AI lab at scale.

Outlook

Open questions over the next 6 to 18 months:

• World Labs commercial trajectory. Marble adoption metrics across gaming, visual-effects, VR, and 3D-design industries; integration depth with the strategic Autodesk partnership; whether spatial intelligence becomes a separable commercial market large enough to support a $2 billion-class valuation.
• Stanford HAI policy output. Continued congressional engagement, the 2026 AI Index report, and the institute's contribution to US federal AI policy through the post-2026 administration transition.
• AI4ALL scaling. Expansion of the high-school summer program and any further national-curriculum partnerships.
• Memoir follow-up. Whether "The Worlds I See" produces a sequel or extended public-engagement program tied to the spatial-intelligence direction.
• Post-2027 Stanford status. Whether Li returns from partial leave to a full Stanford appointment or transitions to full-time World Labs after the August 2027 leave end-date.

Sources

• Fei-Fei Li. Wikipedia biographical entry; covers education, career, ImageNet, HAI, and World Labs.
• Fei-Fei Li - Stanford Profile. Stanford faculty profile with current title, leave status, and administrative appointments.
• Fei-Fei Li - Stanford HAI. HAI staff page with the Denning Co-Director role and HAI activity.
• Fei-Fei Li - Caltech Alumni. Caltech alumni page covering the 2001 to 2005 PhD period.
• Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics. The 2005 Caltech PhD thesis.
• ImageNet: A Large-Scale Hierarchical Image Database. The 2009 CVPR paper introducing ImageNet.
• The Worlds I See. Flatiron Books page for the November 2023 memoir.
• Twitter Appoints Dr. Fei-Fei Li to Board of Directors. May 2020 board appointment announcement.
• TechCrunch: World Labs lands $1B, with $200M from Autodesk. February 2026 World Labs funding round coverage.
• AI4ALL. The official AI4ALL site; covers the founding history and current programs.
• Photo: Wikipedia entry on Fei-Fei Li, CC-BY 2.0 ITU Pictures (AI for Good Global Summit, June 2017).