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Fei-Fei Li (; born in Beijing, China, July 3, 1976) is a Chinese-American computer scientist known for her pioneering work in artificial intelligence (AI), particularly in computer vision. She is best known for establishing ImageNet, the dataset that enabled rapid advances in computer vision in the 2010s. She is the Sequoia Capital professor of computer science at Stanford University and former board director at Twitter. Li is a co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence and a co-director of the Stanford Vision and Learning Lab. She also served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud and is the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit organization working to increase diversity and inclusion in the field of artificial intelligence. Her research expertise includes artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive neuroscience.
In 2023, Li was named one of the Time 100 AI Most Influential People. She received the Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award in the same year for her contributions to artificial intelligence. Li was elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine in 2020, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021.
On August 3, 2023, it was announced that Li was appointed to the United Nations Scientific Advisory Board, established by Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. In 2024, Li was included on the Gold House’s most influential Asian A100 list. In 2024, Fei-Fei Li raised $230 million for a startup called World Labs, which she and three colleagues founded to develop a "spatial intelligence" AI technology that can understand how the three-dimensional physical world works.
Li pursued undergraduate study at Princeton University, where she received a Bachelor of Arts with a major in physics in 1999. Li completed her senior thesis, "Auditory binaural correlogram difference: a new computational model for Dichotic pitch," under the supervision of Bradley Dickinson, professor of electrical engineering. During her years at Princeton, Li returned home most weekends to help run her family's dry cleaning business and worked as a dishwasher to supplement the family income.
Li pursued graduate study at the California Institute of Technology, where she received a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 2001 and a Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering in 2005. Li completed her dissertation, "Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics," under the primary supervision of Pietro Perona and secondary supervision of Christof Koch. Her graduate studies were supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and The Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.
While at Princeton in 2007, Li led the development of ImageNet, a massive visual database designed to advance object recognition in AI. The project involved labeling over 14 million images using Amazon Mechanical Turk and inspired the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), which catalyzed progress in deep learning and led to dramatic improvements in image classification performance. The database addressed a key bottleneck in computer vision: the lack of large, annotated datasets for training machine learning models. Today, ImageNet is credited as a cornerstone innovation that underpins advancements in autonomous vehicles, facial recognition, and medical imaging.
On her sabbatical from Stanford University from January 2017 to fall of 2018, Li joined Google Cloud as its Chief Scientist of AI/ML and Vice President. At Google, her team focused on democratizing AI technology and lowering the barrier for entrance to businesses and developers, including the developments of products like AutoML.
In September 2017, Google secured a contract from the Department of Defense called Project Maven, which aimed to use AI techniques to interpret images captured by drone cameras. Google told employees who protested the company's work on Project Maven that their role was "specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes." In June 2018, Google told employees it would not seek renewal of the contract. In internal emails which were later leaked to reporters, Li expressed enthusiasm for the Google Cloud role in Project Maven, but warned against mentioning its AI component, saying that military AI is linked in the public mind with the danger of autonomous weapons. Asked about those leaked emails, Li told The New York Times, "I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI."
In the fall of 2018, Li left Google and returned to Stanford University to continue her professorship.
According to her Stanford profile, she has been on partial academic leave from January 2024 through the end of 2025 to focus on entrepreneurial ventures.
In 2024, Li said there was a disparity between private-sector investment in AI and support for academic and government research, and called for greater public funding for scientific uses of the technology and for studying its risks.
Li is also known for her non-profit work as the co-founder and chairperson of nonprofit organization AI4ALL, whose mission is to educate the next generation of AI technologists, thinkers and leaders by promoting diversity and inclusion through human-centered AI principles. The program was created in collaboration with Melinda French Gates and Jensen Huang.
Prior to establishing AI4ALL in 2017, Li and her former student Olga Russakovsky, currently an assistant professor in Princeton University, co-founded and co-directed the precursor program at Stanford called SAILORS (Stanford AI Lab OutReach Summers). SAILORS was an annual summer camp at Stanford dedicated to 9th grade high school girls in AI education and research, established in 2015 till it changed its name to AI4ALL @Stanford in 2017. In 2018, AI4ALL has successfully launched five more summer programs in addition to Stanford, including Princeton University, Carnegie Mellon University, Boston University, University of California Berkeley, and Canada's Simon Fraser University.
Li has been described as a "researcher bringing humanity to AI."
Li was elected as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2021, the National Academy of Engineering in 2020, and the National Academy of Medicine in 2020.
In a November 2023 interview with The Guardian, Li said that while she would not refer to herself as the “godmother of AI,” she accepts the description as a way to recognize women’s contributions to the field.
In 2024, while on partial leave from Stanford, Li helped found a startup focused on developing artificial intelligence with "spatial intelligence," a concept involving an AI system’s ability to reason about and act within three-dimensional environments. According to Reuters, the company raised seed funding from investors. The Financial Times later reported that the company, World Labs, had raised two rounds of funding and was valued at more than $1 billion. The technology aims to integrate visual perception with action, such as enabling robotic systems to perform everyday tasks based on verbal instructions. Li described the effort as aiming for more human-like reasoning and interaction with the physical world.
In February 2025, at the Artificial Intelligence Action Summit in Paris, Li stated that AI governance should be based on science rather than "science fiction," and urged a more scientific approach to assessing AI capabilities and limitations.
Li has received numerous accolades, including induction into the National Academy of Engineering (2020), the National Academy of Medicine (2020), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2021). In 2025, she was awarded the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, recognizing her role in advancing deep learning.
In 2007, while at Princeton, Li began developing ImageNet with the goal of building a large-scale visual dataset inspired by an estimate from cognitive psychologist Irving Biederman that humans recognize approximately 30,000 object categories. The project faced early skepticism from colleagues who considered the scale impractical, but Li continued development, ultimately using Amazon Mechanical Turk to help label over 14 million images across 22,000 categories.
Li has led the team of students and collaborators to organize the international competition on ImageNet recognition tasks called ImageNet Large-Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) between 2010 and 2017 in the academic community.
Li's research in computer vision contributed to a line of work called Natural Scene Understanding, or later, story-telling of images. She was recognized for her work in this area by the International Association for Pattern Recognition in 2016. She delivered a talk on the main stage of TED in Vancouver in 2015, and has since then been viewed more than 2 million times.
In recent years, Fei-Fei Li's research work expanded to artificial intelligence in healthcare, collaborating closely with Stanford University School of Medicine professor Arnold Milstein. She has also worked on improving bias in image recognition, for instance by removing concepts with low imageability from ImageNet. (2020). 9781450369367, Association for Computing Machinery. ISBN 9781450369367
On 3 August 2023, Li Fei Fei was announced as a member of the United Nations (UN) Scientific Advisory Board, established by Secretary-General António Guterres. She is among seven external scientists on this board, which also includes the Chief Scientists from various UN agencies, the UN University Rector, and the Secretary-General’s Envoy on Technology. The board's primary aim is to offer independent perspectives on emerging trends that intersect science, technology, ethics, governance, and sustainable development. It is designed to act as a central hub for a network of scientific networks, enhancing the integration of scientific insights into UN decision-making processes.
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