Fei-Fei Li: ImageNet Creator and World Labs Founder

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Fei-Fei Li is the “godmother of AI”: creator of ImageNet, the dataset without which the deep learning breakthrough of 2012 would not have happened, Stanford professor, advisor to Andrej Karpathy, former chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud, and since 2024 founder of World Labs, a startup building “spatial intelligence” that raised a billion dollars in 2026. Facts checked September 18, 2026.

From a New Jersey laundromat to Princeton

Li was born in Beijing and grew up in Chengdu. When she was 12, her father emigrated to Parsippany, New Jersey, and four years later she joined him with her mother, not knowing English well. In high school and during her studies at Princeton, she worked weekends at the family dry-cleaning business and as a dishwasher to contribute to the household budget. She graduated with a degree in physics in 1999 and earned her PhD in electrical engineering from Caltech in 2005, researching image recognition at the intersection of computer science and psychophysics.

ImageNet: the dataset that launched a revolution

In 2007, Li began building ImageNet, a database of tens of millions of manually labeled photographs in thousands of categories, at a time when most researchers focused on algorithms rather than data. It was on ImageNet in 2012 that the AlexNet network by Geoffrey Hinton, Alex Krizhevsky, and Ilya Sutskever crushed the competition and launched the era of deep learning. From 2013 to 2018, Li directed the Stanford AI Lab, where she advised Andrej Karpathy among others, and from 2017 to 2018 she was chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud. In 2017, she co-founded AI4ALL, an organization increasing diversity in the industry.

World Labs and spatial intelligence

In 2024, Li and three collaborators founded World Labs and raised $230 million to develop “spatial intelligence,” meaning models that understand the three-dimensional physical world, not just text and flat images. In 2026, the company raised another billion dollars; I described its Atlas model in the article World Labs and the Atlas world model. Since August 2023, Li has served on the UN Secretary-General’s Scientific Advisory Board. Her book “The Worlds I See” and the concept of “human-centered AI” form the foundation of Stanford’s HAI institute, which she co-directs.

Frequently asked questions

How old is Fei-Fei Li?

50. She was born July 3, 1976 in Beijing.

Why is she called the godmother of AI?

Because ImageNet, which she built, enabled the deep learning breakthrough in 2012, and her students and collaborators went on to create key teams at OpenAI, Tesla, and Google. The term is analogous to the “godfathers” Hinton, LeCun, and Bengio.

What does World Labs do?

World models: AI systems that create coherent three-dimensional environments from images or descriptions and understand the physics of space, with applications in robotics, gaming, and design.

Sources checked September 18, 2026: Wikipedia EN “Fei-Fei Li” with citations (Stanford HAI, Time, Wired, World Labs press releases, UN).

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