A rise from a suburban shop to a billion-dollar artificial intelligence company began with obstacles far from any university campus.
Fei-Fei Li, a professor of computer science at Stanford University and the co-founder and CEO of World Labs — a startup developing technology that allows artificial intelligence systems to visually interpret and interact with the physical world — recently told Bloomberg that the path required years of persistence through uncertainty.
"Science is a nonlinear journey," she said. "Nobody has all the solutions. You have to go through such a challenge to find an answer."
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From Dry Cleaner To Princeton Physics
Li, often described as the "godmother of AI," immigrated from China to New Jersey, at 15 with her parents, who worked cashier jobs while she picked up shifts in Chinese restaurants, according to Bloomberg.
When her mother's health declined as she entered Princeton University, the family opened a dry cleaning store to stay afloat. Li, the only English speaker, handled "all the business," balancing customer calls, inspections, and billing between physics work.
The responsibilities continued after she began her graduate studies at the California Institute of Technology.
She told Bloomberg, she ran the shop remotely for part of her Ph.D., a period that shaped the questions she pursued about how intelligence forms and whether machines could learn from experience the way people do.
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Her curiosity moved toward computer vision, where early breakthroughs were limited because datasets were too small.
She said researchers relied on collections of only a few hundred images. She turned to psychology and linguistics and saw that humans learn from vast exposure. "The scientific datasets we were playing with were tiny," she said.
Building ImageNet And Shifting AI Research
Li believed the lack of data held computer-vision research back. She proposed creating a huge labeled dataset modeled on human cognition in 2007. "I think you've taken this idea way too far," a mentor told her, according to technology news outlet Ars Technica, as algorithms were the main priority at the time.
She went ahead with the plan and led graduate students in assembling ImageNet, a dataset of 14 million images across 22,000 categories. The design helped standardize how models were tested. In 2010, she launched an annual competition requiring each system to run on ImageNet.
"Pre-ImageNet, people did not believe in data," Li said in a September 2024 interview at the Computer History Museum. "Everyone was working on completely different paradigms in AI with a tiny bit of data."
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A Unicorn Focused On Spatial Intelligence
World Labs focuses on "spatial intelligence," or systems that visually interpret and interact with the physical world. The company surpassed a $1 billion valuation after four months, Financial Times reported. Early last month, it released Marble, a product that lets users create downloadable 3D worlds from text prompts.
She also works with policymakers on ethical development of advanced systems. Her bio states she joined the United Nations' scientific breakthrough advisory board in 2023 and has addressed lawmakers and world leaders, including then-President Joe Biden.
"In the entire history of science and technology, so many men are called founding fathers or godfathers. If women are so readily rejecting that title, where is our voice?" she said at the 2024 Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.
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