Godmother of AI and Time’s Person of the Year

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Fei-Fei Li: Godmother of AI

The ‘Mother of Dragons’ is a powerful symbol in the TV series “Game of Thrones”, while in today’s world Dr. Fei-Fei Li has the status of ‘Godmother of AI’. They have laid the foundation for modern AI by teaching machines to see, understand, and learn. The fact that AI is now widely used in the fields of health, education, industry, media and defense is significant, and Fei-Fei Li is one of the few scientists who has attempted to make this technology human-centric.

Time Magazine’s verdict: “Architect of AI”

In the year 2025, Time magazine, following a new tradition, announced the ‘Person of the Year’, which was not an individual but a group, it was called “The Architects of Artificial Intelligence”. These include prominent names like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg and AI godmother Fei-Fei Li. Samay said that now the debate about AI is more on its rapid deployment than on responsibility, which reflects the historical role of these architects.

Fei-Fei Li: from struggle to the top

Dr. Fei-Fei Li was born in 1976 in Beijing, China. At the age of 15, he immigrated with his family to America. Facing financial difficulties, he worked in a dry-cleaning shop alongside his studies. He graduated in Physics from Princeton University and did his PhD in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech). Later, she became a professor of computer science at Stanford University.

ImageNet: A project to give a new vision to AI

Fei-Fei Li’s worldwide identity building project is ImageNet, which started in 2006. It was a huge dataset of millions of images, which was organized and classified. The 2012 ImageNet Challenge was a turning point that revolutionized deep learning, enabling machines to recognize and understand images.

From Google to World Labs

During 2017–2018, Fei-Fei Li was Vice President and Chief Scientist (AI/ML) at Google Cloud, where she worked on practical and responsible AI systems. Subsequently, she became the co-founder and CEO of World Labs, a fast-growing AI startup.

World Model and the future of AI

At World Labs, Fei-Fei Li focuses on World Model technology, which does not limit AI to just text and images, but develops the ability to understand and interact with 3D worlds. Marble, their first product, turns text, photos or videos into a 3D environment.

The voice of human-centered AI

Fei-Fei Li is not only a technology expert, but also a leading voice on the ethical direction of AI. He co-founded Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI). With government policymakers and global organizations, she is working for the safe and responsible use of AI.