AI pioneer says public discourse on intelligent machines must give 'proper respect to human agency'
She’s an important figure behind today’s artificial intelligence boom, but not all computer scientists thought Fei-Fei Li was on the right track when she came up with the idea for a giant visual database called ImageNet that took years to build
She's an important figure behind today's artificial intelligence boom, but not all computer scientists thought Fei-Fei Li was on the right track when she came up with the idea for a giant visual database called ImageNet that took years to build.
Li, now a founding director of Stanford University's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence, is out with a new memoir that recounts her pioneering work in curating the dataset that accelerated the computer vision branch of AI.
The book, “The World I See,” also portrays her formative years that abruptly shifted from China to New Jersey and follows her through academia, Silicon Valley and the halls of Congress as growing commercialization of AI technology brought public attention and a backlash. She spoke with The Associated Press about the book and the current AI moment. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Q: Your book describes how you envisioned ImageNet as more than just a huge data set. Can you explain?
A: ImageNet really is the quintessential story of identifying the North Star of an AI problem and then finding a way to get there. The North Star for me was to really rethink how we can solve the problem of visual intelligence. One of the most fundamental problems in visual intelligence is understanding, or seeing, objects because the world is made of objects. Human vision is grounded in our understanding of objects. And there are many, many, many of them. ImageNet is really an attempt to define the
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