Having the nickname “AI Godmother” comes first for Fei-Fei Li, who is known for building large databases of labeled images that are critical to advancing the way computers understand digital images and videos. was unpleasant. At one point, she wasn’t even sure if she should be the CEO of her startup.
Mr. Lee currently runs World Labs, which has generated $230 million in funding. The company aims to build AI that can process and replicate the 3D world.
“What always fascinates and drives me is unlocking the full power of machine intelligence science,” Lee said at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Conference’s Focus on the Future of (Ethical) AI. He spoke at a panel discussion on Lee spoke alongside Campbell Brown, senior advisor at AI content and licensing company Tallbit.
Lee’s prominence in the AI shift is key to understanding the technology’s capabilities and limitations amidst all the hype, Brown said. “Some people on the front lines may be exaggerating somewhat,” she says. Still, Lee and WorldLab are working on a breakthrough idea.
Over hundreds of millions of years of evolution of human intelligence, language has not been all that impressive, Lee explained. She says that while it took about 430 million years for advanced animals to develop spatial intelligence, language abilities, such as those reproduced by active LLM, were perfected in just “a million years or so.”
But despite having years of expertise in the field of machine intelligence and a long list of esteemed positions, ranging from vice president and chief scientist at Google to professor at Stanford University and author. Mr. Lee was hesitant to take center stage.
In fact, her first reaction was to simply reject the “godmother” position. “I was disgusted,” Lee said. But she decided not to fight the issue in order to encourage other women, especially those in STEM fields that have long been dominated by men.
“Throughout the history of science and technology, there are many people who are called Founding Fathers or Godfathers,” she noted. “If women so easily reject that title, where is our voice?”
Lee added that many of the “billions” claims about global scale, limitless production and AI are hype.
“That’s very hyperbolic,” Lee said. But she argues that AI has the potential to change the world, and that “everyone with an interest” in research, governance, and implementation should participate in the technology’s transformation.
“It’s really important that people of all backgrounds feel like they have a role,” Lee said.
