Fei Fei Li

speaker
223 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2024 last heard Dec 2024

Fei Fei Li’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard · Fei Fei Li (on a human-centered approach to AI) · 11 Dec 2024 podcast
No, but they are very different. Of course, I've been a scientist for almost three decades, so I'm more familiar with being a scientist. But the creative writing journey, I loved every minute of it. When I say I love, it's not necessarily happy love. It's a painful, lovesome part of it. But I really loved it.
No, and I didn't want to and I still don't.
Well, I have to say, I think culture in the case of an individual sometimes is too broad a brushstroke. I think it's more individual. I'm a relatively shy person. And Alex and I wrote the first version. It was purely scientific. It was the first year of COVID. We talk on the phone almost every night. And one of my best friend is a philosopher at Stanford called John H. Mindy.
He's a very revered higher education leader. He was Stanford's provost for 17 years. And he is co-director with me at Stanford Human Center Institute. So I was really proud I wrote this first draft. I showed it to him. It was during COVID. After like two weeks, he called me. He said, Feifei, you and Alex should come to my backyard. That's how we meet because we were social distancing.
And then we went and he said, you have to rewrite. I was like, what? That's the last thing I want to do here. He said, you're missing an opportunity to tell your story, tell AI story through your lens. And I was just so rejecting that idea. I was like, who? wants to hear my story. I want to write about AI. I call him Edge.
Edge said, there are many AI scientists who can write a so-called quote-unquote objective story of AI, but your angle would be so meaningful, your voice to the young people out there, the young women, immigrants, people of all kind of backgrounds. And we were sitting in his backyard with a triangular shape, three chairs. And I looked at Alex. He was almost jumping off his chair. With excitement.
He said, I told you. He said, I told you so many times. Of course, it only takes Edge to tell you that.
It's very subtle you caught that because when I go into the world of science, I don't think too much about many other things. I just follow that light, follow the curiosity. And to this day, even when I was writing the book, it's AI that fascinates me and I wanted to write about AI. So it was very strange that someone wants to read about science. Me.
Yes, but I do want to be honest, even when I was a young kid in China, I loved math and physics. I love physics, I would say even more than math itself. I saw math more as a tool. I saw more beauty and fascination in physics.
Yes.
Yeah.
She is very interesting. My mom come from a normal family. But as the book says, our family is in a difficult position because of the history. So she was a very good student. I think the intellectual intensity I have, a large part of it come from my mom. She was a curious student. She was very intense.
But her dream was pretty shattered when she was not able to go to a normal high school when she had a dream for college. And that carried her through.
A lot of this is hindsight because I didn't talk to my mom in this way, right? I think it was a combination that my mom has her own longing to be more free, maybe. And in hindsight, I don't know if she knew how to translate that in the world she was living in. And the opportunity to go to a new world was as appetizing to her as it is for her on my behalf.
It's also true she saw me as a bit of a quirky kid. I think that blend of what she was longing for and what she was longing for on my behalf without me realizing was the motivation of many of the changes, the decision of immigration.
My mom was not looking for attention for me. My mom was looking for freedom for me. And for herself, a lot of that is projection, was looking for a world where I can just be who I am. She wasn't necessarily looking for attention. What do you mean by quirky? This goes to my dad. I didn't follow rules in the average way. In hindsight, maybe it was just me being immature.
But also there is a part of me, why should girls not play soccer? Why should girls be told they are biologically less smart than boys? I was told at least more than once, watch out that girls will in general be less smart by the time you hit your teenage time.
I wasn't told in the context of one-one, like, let me sit you down, Feifei, and tell you. I was told in the way that teachers will say things to boys.
Or the context. Society had a whole different expectation for boys. I was very lucky my own family protected me, but they can only protect me so much. As soon as you enter a school system, as soon as you interact with society, all that came through. From that point of view, I was not following the normal path. I was reading different books.
I was so passionate about flights, UFOs, physics, special relativity. I would grab my classmates to talk about that, but that was just not normal.
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