A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AI—and for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it, she was helping build the foundation.
In this fireside, she recounts the creation of ImageNet, a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods, the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in 2012, and how those breakthroughs led to captioning, storytelling, and ultimately, generative models.
Now, she’s taking on one of AI’s hardest frontiers: spatial intelligence. Fei-Fei shares why modeling the 3D world is essential for AGI—and why it may be even more difficult than language.
Chapters:
00:08 – The Origins of ImageNet
02:15 – The Dream to Make Machines See
03:28 – A paradigm shift in AI
04:42 – The Breakthrough Year: AlexNet and Deep Learning
08:00 – Evolving Computer Vision
12:20 – Building World Labs
13:00 – The next frontier in AI
14:20 – Why Spatial Intelligence Is Harder Than Language
18:40 – Technical Barriers for Vision-Based AI
20:00 – AI is more than LLMs
24:19 – Real-World Applications of World Models
25:50 – Fei Fei’s Journey
29:30 – Mentoring some of the legends of AI
33:00 – Audience Q&A
