Fei-Fei Li (born July 3, 1976) is a Chinese-born American computer scientist widely recognized as a pioneer in the field of artificial intelligence. Often referred to as the "Godmother of AI," she is best known for her groundbreaking contributions to computer vision, particularly the development of ImageNet, a massive visual database that catalyzed the modern deep learning revolution. Currently, she serves as the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and is a founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI). In 2024, she founded World Labs, a startup focused on developing "spatial intelligence" technology to enable AI to understand and interact with three-dimensional physical environments. Born in Beijing, China, Li was raised in Chengdu, Sichuan. In 1992, at the age of 16, she immigrated to the United States with her parents, settling in Parsippany, New Jersey. Her early experience in the U.S. was defined by economic challenges; she worked part-time jobs, including as a waitress and dry-cleaning assistant, while attending Parsippany High School. Encouraged by her high school math teacher, she pursued rigorous academic interests, eventually winning a scholarship to Princeton University. In 1999, she graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in physics with high honors. She subsequently earned her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005, where her doctoral research focused on visual recognition and computational models. Li’s academic career began with faculty positions at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2005–2006) and Princeton University (2007–2009). She joined the Stanford University faculty in 2009 as an assistant professor. Her work at Stanford quickly gained international prominence through the creation of ImageNet. At a time when the AI community was largely focused on refining algorithms, Li hypothesized that the path to better machine learning lay in larger, more diverse datasets. She led the effort to crowdsource the annotation of millions of images, creating a hierarchical database that provided the necessary infrastructure for training deep convolutional neural networks. The annual ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC) became a critical benchmark for the field, and its public release is widely credited with kickstarting the rapid advancement of deep learning and computer vision in the 2010s. From 2013 to 2018, Li served as the director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL). During a sabbatical from 2017 to 2018, she served as a vice president at Google and the chief scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, where she contributed to the democratization of AI tools through platforms like AutoML. Beyond her technical contributions, Li is a vocal advocate for diversity and inclusion in technology. She co-founded the non-profit organization AI4ALL in 2017, which aims to increase representation in AI education for women and underrepresented minorities. She has also served on the boards of companies such as Twitter. In recent years, Li has expanded her focus toward "spatial intelligence," arguing that AI models need to move beyond language and image generation to understand the physical world in three dimensions. This ambition led to the founding of World Labs in 2024, a company that develops "large world models" capable of perceiving and interacting with 3D space. Li’s extensive professional honors include election to 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 prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering for her foundational role in advancing deep learning. She is also a prolific researcher, with hundreds of peer-reviewed articles to her name, and an author of the memoir, *The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI*. She is married to computer scientist Silvio Savarese, with whom she has two children. Through her academic leadership, research, and policy advocacy, Li continues to shape the ethical and technical trajectory of artificial intelligence, emphasizing a human-centered approach to technological development.