AI godmother ‘Fei-Fei’ in the spotlight:She started as a restaurant worker, later ran dry-cleaning shop; know her full life story

Today, AI robots working in Amazon’s stores and fulfilment centres can easily identify a specified item among the 10 lakh products in a warehouse. AI gained this ability to recognise objects from “ImageNet”, an invention by American AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li. She discovered it in 2007 with Kai Li, a professor at Princeton University. As part of this work, 49,000 workers from 167 countries sorted and labelled more than 16 crore photographs, enabling AI to learn to recognise objects. She was subsequently called the ‘godmother of AI.’ Fei-Fei Li’s early life was marked by struggle after she left China and arrived in the United States with her family. Her father worked repairing cameras in the US. To help with the family’s expenses, Fei-Fei began working at a Chinese restaurant in the United States, where she was paid $2 an hour. When she was enrolling at Princeton University for her college studies, her mother’s health deteriorated. The family opened a dry-cleaning shop, which Fei-Fei herself ran. According to an interview, she ran the shop for around seven years.
Fei-Fei has loved books from an early age. During her teenage years, she was also very interested in aerospace and flying saucers. When her children were young, she was very strict about screen time. One child was not allowed any screen time at all, while the other was allowed to watch only one film a week. She was ahead of other children in her studies While studying in high school, she had advanced so far ahead of the other children in mathematics that the school had no higher-level course left to teach her. Career: From teaching at universities to an AI lab After completing her PhD, Fei-Fei taught at the University of Illinois and Princeton. In 2007, she created ‘ImageNet’ with Princeton professor Kai Li. It laid the foundation for today’s AI. She served as director of the Stanford AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. In 2024, she launched the start-up ‘World Labs’. On 28 September, chip company AMD announced that it would acquire the start-up for around ₹78,000 crore. Marriage: Her husband is a computer scientist and robotics expert Fei-Fei married Italian-American scientist Silvio Savarese. Savarese is a computer scientist and robotics expert. Both earned their PhDs from the California Institute of Technology in the United States. When Fei-Fei became an assistant professor at Stanford, Savarese was at the University of Michigan. To live together, Savarese joined Stanford in 2013. Family: Mother was a teacher and father was a computer operator Fei-Fei was born in Beijing, China. Her mother was a teacher at Kuang Ying Secondary School, while her father worked in the computer department of a chemical factory. Her father moved to the United States when Fei-Fei was 12. Around three years later, she and her mother also moved to the United States. There, her father worked repairing cameras. Interesting fact: An OpenAI founder was her PhD student Andrej Karpathy, a founding member of OpenAI, AI ethics researcher Timnit Gebru and Olga Russakovsky were her students. She won the Win Future Grand Prize worth around ₹25 crore in December 2024. Fei-Fei received the award for creating ImageNet. Achievement: Named TIME Person of the Year and included in the list of 100 AI figures In 2025, she received the prestigious Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering. King Charles III presented the honour at St James’s Palace. TIME magazine named ‘Architects of AI’ its Person of the Year for 2025. Fei-Fei Li was among the eight faces featured on the cover. Special: Delivered a speech from the platform where Einstein had addressed an audience She has been a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. At Princeton, she addressed more than 450 people from the same platform where Albert Einstein explained the theory of relativity in 1921.