Fei-Fei Li

Overview

Almost every biography of Fei-Fei Li opens with ImageNet or the “Godmother of AI” nickname, and almost none mention that California’s governor tapped her to co-write the state’s artificial-intelligence policy blueprint after vetoing its flagship AI safety bill. After Governor Gavin Newsom vetoed California’s SB 1047, he tapped Li to co-author a report on AI policy; the report offered research-informed advice on transparency, independent oversight, and whistleblower protections, and Senator Scott Wiener said he was considering its recommendations for new AI legislation (The Economic Times).

That policy role is one thread of a career that has repeatedly placed Li where AI’s technical core meets its real-world consequences. Two days before this profile’s publication, AMD announced it would acquire her startup World Labs for approximately $8.2 billion and install her as its chief scientist (AFP via Malay Mail).

The $8.2 billion AMD acquisition

Chip maker AMD announced on September 28, 2026 that it had acquired World Labs, the AI company Li founded, in a deal valued at approximately $8.2 billion that would make Li, a Stanford computer science professor, chief scientist at AMD (AFP via Malay Mail). Under the agreement the transaction was expected to close by the end of 2026, and Li was to become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting directly to CEO Lisa Su (The Economic Times).

Technology analyst Patrick Moorhead characterized the move as “a talent and model-insight buy, not a revenue play,” adding that “AMD gets the people building the models its future chips will have to run,” and quoted Li’s own case from her side: “Without having a focused hardware effort, AI is hobbled in efficiency” (The Economic Times). In her blog post on the deal she wrote that “now that we have tangible proof of the possibilities, we want to do everything we can to accelerate the future,” adding that “to do this requires scaling our efforts, widening our reach, and getting closer to the hardware” (AFP via Malay Mail).

World Labs and spatial intelligence

Li launched World Labs in September 2024 with a $230 million raise led jointly by Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, and Radical Ventures, with AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, and Nvidia’s NVentures among the other investors; the San Francisco-based startup declined to share its valuation (Reuters). Her co-founders were computer vision researchers Justin Johnson, Christoph Lassner, and Ben Mildenhall, and the company started with 20 employees (Reuters). Nvidia thus backed Li’s venture two years before AMD bought it outright.

The company pursues what Li calls “spatial intelligence” — AI technology that can understand how the three-dimensional physical world works, rather than merely generating text and images (Reuters). World Labs builds “world models,” which learn how the physical world actually works so they can simulate and predict what happens, with applications in robotics and virtual simulations (AFP via Malay Mail). “The images and videos that you have seen so far coming out of generative AI models do not give you enough of the whole sense of how a 3D world is built,” Li told Reuters, adding that this sense is fundamental to broader reasoning capabilities in AI systems — and would avoid “hallucinations” like hands with the wrong number of fingers (Reuters). The models use the same transformer-based architecture behind chatbots, but the transformer would not be the “be-all and end-all” of their models, she said, suggesting other elements would be incorporated (Reuters).

ImageNet and the academic career

Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in Stanford’s Computer Science Department and a founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI, and she served as director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018 (Stanford Engineering). She earned her B.A. in physics from Princeton in 1999 with High Honors and her Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Caltech in 2005, and has published more than 400 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, making her one of the most cited computer scientists (Stanford Engineering).

She is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, the large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort widely regarded as one of the three driving forces of the birth of modern AI and the deep learning revolution (Stanford Engineering). Li conceived of and began building ImageNet while she was on the Princeton faculty, creating a computer vision dataset that led to what Princeton calls a paradigm shift in machine learning (Princeton Research). Reuters described the dataset as helping “usher in a generation of computer vision technologies that could identify objects reliably for the first time” (Reuters).

The “Godmother of AI” moniker alludes to the three “godfather” winners of the 2018 Turing Award for breakthroughs in AI technology (Reuters). Li told the story of her early years in her memoir: as a Princeton student she borrowed money to buy a dry-cleaning business for her parents and spent her weekends working there (Reuters). That memoir, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, was published by Macmillan Publishers and was chosen as the 2024 Princeton Pre-read (Stanford Engineering; Princeton Research).

Industry, policy, and AI4ALL

During a sabbatical from Stanford, Li served from 2017 to 2018 as a vice president at Google and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud, and she later served on Twitter’s board of directors (Stanford Engineering; Reuters). Her policy work includes U.S. Senate and Congressional testimonies, a special advisor role to the UN Secretary General, membership in the California Future of Work Commission in 2019–2020, and membership in the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and the National Science Foundation in 2021–2022 (Stanford Engineering).

In 2015, while leading Stanford’s AI Lab, Li started a summer camp with Olga Russakovsky and Rick Sommer introducing high school girls to AI; the program was extended nationally in 2017 with the formation of the nonprofit AI4ALL, whose mission is increasing diversity and inclusion in the field and democratizing access to AI tools (Education Week).

Recognition

Li is a laureate of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, announced in February and presented by King Charles III at St. James’s Palace in London on November 5, 2025, for pioneering contributions to the development of modern machine learning (Princeton Research; Stanford Engineering). She received it alongside six other AI luminaries — Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, John Hopfield, Bill Dally, Yann LeCun, and Nvidia founder Jensen Huang — and the cohort visited No. 10 Downing Street for a roundtable with the secretary of state for science, innovation and technology before the ceremony (Princeton Research). She also won the VinFuture Prize in 2024 and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in AI in 2023 and recognized as Time’s Person of the Year in 2025 (Stanford Engineering).

What this profile does not claim

This profile does not state Li’s exact birth date or age, which was not verified from an independently read source. It does not give the year of her Intel Lifetime Achievements Award, because sources differ and the year could not be independently confirmed. It does not assert details of reported World Labs products or a reported 2026 funding round, which appeared only in snippets or AI-generated indexes that could not be read and verified. It does not claim the AMD acquisition has closed or state Li’s current Stanford faculty status, which was not confirmed as of publication. The Stanford Engineering faculty page is an institutional source used here only for uncontested career facts, alongside independent wire and newspaper reporting.