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Home » Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI (Transcript)

Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI (Transcript)

Read the full transcript of godmother of AI Dr. Fei-Fei Li in conversation with Diana Hu of Y Combinator on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco.

Opening Remarks

DR. FEI-FEI LI: My entire career is going after problems that are just so hard, bordering delusional. To me AGI will not be complete without spatial intelligence, and I want to solve that problem. I just love being an entrepreneur. Forget about what you have done in the past, forget about what others think of you. Just hunker down and build. That is my comfort zone.

DIANA HU: So I’m super excited here to have Dr. Fei-Fei Li. She has such a long career in AI. I’m sure a lot of you know her, right? Raise your hand.

DR. FEI-FEI LI: I know you too.

DIANA HU: She’s been named the godmother of AI. One of the first projects that you created was ImageNet in 2009, 16 years ago.

DR. FEI-FEI LI: Oh my God, don’t remind me of that now.

DIANA HU: It has over 80,000 citations and it really kicked off one of the legs of stools for AI, which is the data problem. Tell us about how that project came about. It was pretty pioneering work back then.

The Birth of ImageNet

DR. FEI-FEI LI: Yeah. Well, first of all, Diana and Gary and everybody, thanks for inviting me here. I’m so excited to be here because I feel like I’m just one of you. I’m also an entrepreneur right now. Just started a small company. So very excited to be here.

ImageNet was… Yeah, you’re right. We actually conceived that almost 18 years ago. Time really flies. I was a first year assistant professor at Princeton. Oh, wow. Hi. Hi. Tigers. Yeah.

And the world of AI and machine learning was so different at that time.