Fei-Fei Li (Chinese: 李飞飞; pinyin: Lǐ Fēifēi; born July 3, 1976) is a Chinese-born American computer scientist. She is the Sequoia Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute. Li is best known for establishing ImageNet, a large-scale visual database that became a benchmark for training and evaluating machine learning models in computer vision. Her research spans artificial intelligence, deep learning, and cognitive neuroscience, and she has published over 300 peer-reviewed papers. Li has been called the "Godmother of AI" for her contributions to the field.
Early life and education
Li was born in Beijing, China, in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu, Sichuan. At age 12, her father immigrated to Parsippany, New Jersey, and Li joined him with her mother at age 16. While attending Parsippany High School, she worked weekends at her family's dry-cleaning shop. She graduated in 1995 and was later inducted into the school's hall of fame in 2017.
Li pursued undergraduate studies at Princeton University, where she earned a Bachelor of Arts in physics in 1999. Her senior thesis, "Auditory correlogram difference: a new computational model for Huggins dichotic pitch," was supervised by Bradley Dickinson, a professor of electrical engineering. During her Princeton years, she returned home most weekends to help run the family dry-cleaning business and worked as a dishwasher to supplement income.
She continued at the California Institute of Technology, receiving a Master of Science in electrical engineering in 2001 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 2005. Her dissertation, "Visual Recognition: Computational Models and Human Psychophysics," was supervised by Pietro Perona, with Christof Koch as secondary advisor. Her graduate studies were supported by the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowships for New Americans.
Academic career
Li began her academic career as an assistant professor in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign from 2005 to 2006. She then moved to Princeton University, where she was an assistant professor in the Computer Science Department from 2007 to 2009.
In 2009, Li joined Stanford University as an assistant professor. She was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 2012 and to full professor in 2018. At Stanford, she directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL) from 2013 to 2018. In 2019, she became the founding co-director of the Stanford Human-Centered AI Institute, alongside John Etchemendy, former provost of Stanford. The institute focuses on advancing AI research, education, policy, and practice to benefit humanity.
Li has been on partial academic leave from January 2024 through the end of 2025 to focus on entrepreneurial ventures, according to her Stanford profile.
ImageNet and computer vision
While at Princeton in 2007, Li initiated the ImageNet project, a large-scale visual database designed to advance object recognition in AI. The project involved labeling over 14 million images using Amazon Mechanical Turk, a crowdsourcing platform. ImageNet inspired the ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge (ILSVRC), an annual competition that began in 2010. The challenge catalyzed progress in deep learning, leading to dramatic improvements in image classification performance, particularly after 2012 when neural network models achieved superhuman accuracy. ImageNet addressed a key bottleneck in computer vision: the lack of large, annotated datasets for training machine learning models. Today, ImageNet is credited as a cornerstone innovation underpinning advancements in autonomous vehicles, facial recognition, and medical imaging.
Industry and government work
From January 2017 to fall 2018, Li took a sabbatical from Stanford to serve as Chief Scientist of AI/ML and Vice President at Google Cloud. Her team focused on democratizing AI technology, including developing products like AutoML, which automates the design of machine learning models.
In September 2017, Google secured a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense called Project Maven, which aimed to use AI techniques to interpret images captured by drone cameras. Google told employees who protested the company's work on Project Maven that their role was "specifically scoped to be for non-offensive purposes." In June 2018, Google announced it would not seek renewal of the contract. Internal emails later leaked to reporters revealed that Li expressed enthusiasm for the Google Cloud role in Project Maven but warned against mentioning its AI component, saying that military AI is linked in the public mind with the danger of autonomous weapons. Asked about those leaked emails, Li told The New York Times, "I believe in human-centered AI to benefit people in positive and benevolent ways. It is deeply against my principles to work on any project that I think is to weaponize AI."
In fall 2018, Li left Google and returned to Stanford to continue her professorship.
Health AI initiative
In 2023, Li co-led the launch of RAISE-Health (Responsible AI for Safe and Equitable Health) at Stanford University, in collaboration with Stanford Medicine. The initiative aims to develop frameworks for the responsible use of artificial intelligence in healthcare, including clinical care, biomedical research, and patient safety.
Entrepreneurship
In 2024, Li co-founded World Labs, a startup focused on "spatial intelligence" AI technology that can understand how the three-dimensional physical world works. The company raised $230 million in its initial funding round in 2024, and by 2026, World Labs raised an additional $1 billion. Li has noted a disparity between private-sector investment in AI and support for academic research, a theme she has addressed in public discussions.
Honors and recognition
Li has received numerous awards for her contributions to AI. In 2017, she received the Intel Lifetime Achievements Innovation Award. She was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering in 2020 and the National Academy of Medicine in 2020. In 2021, she was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In 2023, Li was named one of the Time 100 AI Most Influential People. In 2024, she was included on the Gold House's most influential Asian A100 list. In 2025, she was named one of the "Architects of AI" for Time's Person of the Year.
Personal life
Li is married and has a daughter. She has spoken publicly about her immigrant experience and the importance of diversity in AI. Her work emphasizes human-centered AI, aiming to ensure that technological advances benefit people in positive and benevolent ways.