Fei-Fei Li

Lore & Background

Fei-Fei Li was born in Beijing, China, in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan. She studied at Sichuan Chengdu No.7 High School. When she was 12, her father immigrated to Parsippany, New Jersey; she and her mother joined him when she was 16. While attending Parsippany High School, she worked weekends at her family's dry-cleaning shop, graduating in 1995. She pursued undergraduate study at Princeton University, receiving a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1999, and completed her senior thesis on auditory binaural correlogram difference under Bradley Dickinson. During her Princeton years, she returned home most weekends to help run the dry cleaning business and worked as a dishwasher. She earned a Master of Science and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology in 2001 and 2005, respectively, supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.

Li served as an assistant professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2005 to 2006 and at Princeton University from 2007 to 2009, where she led the development of ImageNet in 2007. She joined Stanford in 2009, becoming associate professor with tenure in 2012 and full professor in 2018. She directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab from 2013 to 2018 and co-founded the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit to increase diversity in AI. She served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud from January 2017 to fall 2018, where her team worked on AutoML and the controversial Project Maven. Li later stated it was deeply against her principles to work on any project to weaponize AI. In 2023, she co-led the RAISE-Health initiative at Stanford for responsible AI in healthcare.

Reader's Guide

Fei-Fei Li's significance lies in her creation of ImageNet, a massive visual database that addressed a key bottleneck in computer vision: the lack of large, annotated datasets for training machine learning models. By labeling over 14 million images via Amazon Mechanical Turk and inspiring the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge, she catalyzed progress in deep learning and dramatically improved image classification performance. ImageNet is credited as a cornerstone innovation underpinning advancements in autonomous vehicles, facial recognition, and medical imaging. Her legacy extends to human-centered AI through her co-direction of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and her nonprofit AI4ALL, which promotes diversity and inclusion in AI education. She has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and was named one of Time's 100 AI Most Influential People in 2023 and an 'Architect of AI' for Time's Person of the Year in 2025. In 2024, she raised $230 million for World Labs, a startup developing spatial intelligence AI, which raised $1 billion in 2026. Her call for greater public funding for scientific AI uses and risk study highlights her ongoing influence on AI policy and ethics.

Did You Know?

• Li worked weekends at her family's dry-cleaning shop while attending Parsippany High School and later returned home most weekends from Princeton to help run the business.
• She completed her Ph.D. dissertation, 'Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics', under the supervision of Pietro Perona and Christof Koch at Caltech.
• In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization working to increase diversity in the field of artificial intelligence, in collaboration with Melinda French Gates and Jensen Huang.