Photo: ITU Pictures, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Fei-Fei Li
Co-founder & CEO, World Labs
World Labs (opens in a new tab)Palo Alto, United States
Creator of ImageNet and a defining figure in computer vision. The Sequoia Professor at Stanford and founding co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute (HAI), she is currently on partial leave from Stanford through 2027 while building World Labs, a startup developing "spatial intelligence" AI.
Research background
Li holds a PhD from Caltech and previously directed the Stanford AI Lab and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. ImageNet, the large labelled-image dataset she built starting in 2006, became a foundation of the deep-learning era in computer vision.
She co-founded Stanford HAI in 2019 to focus research, education and policy on AI that is responsible and human-centred. In September 2026 she argued publicly that safety claims from AI labs need independent, external verification - internal measurement alone, she said, is not a substitute for standards set by governments, industry and academic institutions.
Research and public work
Something wrong here? Tell us and we will check the source.
See all people