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The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI Hardcover – November 7, 2023

by Fei-Fei Li (Author)
4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 450 ratings
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ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON AI * FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023

From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" (Financial Times).

Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientists―a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table―who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.”

Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China’s middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.

Fei-Fei’s adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities―and the extraordinary dangers―of the technology she loves.

The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century’s defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is―and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart.

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  1. Print length
    336 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift Book
  4. Publication date
    November 7, 2023
  5. Dimensions
    6.5 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    1250897939
  7. ISBN-13
    978-1250897930
  8. See all details
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  1. It matters what motivates the development of AI, in both science and industry, and I believe that motivation must explicitly center on human benefit.
    Highlighted by 336 Kindle readers
  2. Increased attention was being paid to algorithms that solved problems by discovering patterns from examples, rather than being explicitly programmed—in other words, learning what to do rather than being told. Researchers gave it a fitting name: “machine learning.”
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From the Publisher

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Editorial Reviews

Review

Praise for The Worlds I See

“An affecting memoir … Her story of overcoming adversity inspires. This brings new dimension and humanity to discussions of AI.”
―Publishers Weekly

"An inspiring personal journey from immigrant childhood to trailblazing scientist, The Worlds I See advocates for overcoming societal barriers and makes a compelling case for a human-centric, ethical approach to AI."
―Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry, CRISPR pioneer, and coauthor of A Crack in Creation

"Fei-Fei Li is one of the scientists responsible for the birth of today's most widely discussed science, Artificial Intelligence. In The Worlds I See she gives the best explanation of AI that I've ever read while telling the story of her own profoundly American journey as a young immigrant who finds herself through education. This is a must-read."
―Condoleezza Rice, Director of the Hoover Institution at Stanford and 66th Secretary of State of the United States.

“A remarkable book from one of the leading scientists in the field of artificial intelligence. It’s both a moving and personal coming of age story of a young scientist and a riveting narrative that brings the reader into the earliest days of one of the most consequential scientific developments of our time. The Worlds I See is a deeply human story that is ultimately about Fei-Fei Li’s lifelong passion for learning and deep love of science.”
―Ed Catmull, cofounder Pixar, bestselling author of Creativity Inc.

"A fascinating and galvanizing memoir, The Worlds I See is a testament to the power and possibility of humanity―one told through Fei-Fei Li’s own remarkable trajectory from humble origins to becoming one of AI’s key visionaries, and in her essential work to develop and use that technology to improve the human condition."
―Reid Hoffman, co-founder of Linkedin and Inflection.AI, bestselling author of Impromptu

"Fei-Fei Li was the first computer vision researcher to truly understand the power of big data and her work opened the floodgates for deep learning. She delivers an urgent, clear-eyed account of the awesome potential―and danger―of the AI technology that she helped to unleash and her call for action and collective responsibility is desperately needed at this pivotal moment in history."
―Geoff Hinton, Turing Award winner, and Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

"Readers looking for a portal into a science that is not often illuminated or connected back to the human experience may especially enjoy this memoir." ―Booklist

About the Author

Fei-Fei Li is a computer science professor at Stanford University and founding director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI as well as a founder and chairperson of the board of the nonprofit AI4ALL. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift Book (November 7, 2023)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 336 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1250897939
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1250897930
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.5 x 1.1 x 9.6 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.7 4.7 out of 5 stars 450 ratings

About the author

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Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li

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Dr. Fei-Fei Li is a world-renowned AI scientist, professor, scholar and industry leader. She is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She served as the Director of Stanford’s AI Lab from 2013 to 2018. And during her sabbatical from Stanford from January 2017 to September 2018, she was Vice President at Google and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. Dr. Fei-Fei Li obtained her B.A. degree in physics from Princeton in 1999 with High Honors, and her PhD degree in electrical engineering from California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in 2005. She also holds a Doctorate Degree (Honorary) from Harvey Mudd College. Dr. Li joined Stanford in 2009 as an assistant professor. Prior to that, she was on faculty at Princeton University (2007-2009) and University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (2005-2006).

Dr. Fei-Fei Li’s current research interests include cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and AI+healthcare especially ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery. In the past she has also worked on cognitive and computational neuroscience. Dr. Li has published more than 300 peer-reviewed scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences, including Nature, PNAS, Journal of Neuroscience, CVPR, ICCV, NIPS, ECCV, ICRA, IROS, RSS, IJCV, IEEE-PAMI, New England Journal of Medicine, Nature Digital Medicine, etc. Dr. Li is the inventor of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI. In addition to her technical contributions, she is a national leading voice for advocating diversity in STEM and AI. She is co-founder and chairperson of the national non-profit AI4ALL aimed at increasing inclusion and diversity in AI education.

Dr. Li has been working with policymakers nationally and locally to ensure the responsible use of technologies, including a congressional testimony on the responsibility of AI in 2018, her service as a member of the California Future of Work Commission for the Governor of California in 2019 - 2020, and a member of the National Artificial Intelligence Research Resource Task Force (NAIRR) for the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) in 2021-2022.

Dr. Li is an elected Member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM) and American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS). She is also a Fellow of ACM, a member of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), a recipient of the 2022 IEEE PAMI Thomas Huang Memorial Prize, 2019 IEEE PAMI Longuet-Higgins Prize, 2019 National Geographic Society Further Award, 2017 Athena Award for Academic Leadership, IAPR 2016 J.K. Aggarwal Prize, the 2016 IEEE PAMI Mark Everingham Award, the 2016 nVidia Pioneer in AI Award, 2014 IBM Faculty Fellow Award, 2011 Alfred Sloan Faculty Award, 2012 Yahoo Labs FREP award, 2009 NSF CAREER award, the 2006 Microsoft Research New Faculty Fellowship, among others. Dr. Li is a keynote speaker at many academic or influential conferences, including the World Economics Forum (Davos), the Grace Hopper Conference 2017 and the TED2015 main conference. Work from Dr. Li's lab have been featured in a variety of magazines and newspapers including New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Fortune Magazine, Science, Wired Magazine, MIT Technology Review, Financial Times, and more. She was selected as a 2017 Women in Tech by the ELLE Magazine, a 2017 Awesome Women Award by Good Housekeeping, a Global Thinker of 2015 by Foreign Policy, and one of the “Great Immigrants: The Pride of America” in 2016 by the Carnegie Foundation, past winners include Albert Einstein, Yoyo Ma, Sergey Brin, et al.

Customer reviews

4.7 out of 5 stars
4.7 out of 5
450 global ratings
Pioneering Perseverance: Fei Fei Li and the AI Revolution
5 Stars
Pioneering Perseverance: Fei Fei Li and the AI Revolution
Dr. Fei Fei Li's memoir, 'The Worlds I See,' is a gripping tale of resilience and trailblazing genius. I preordered and got it on release day, just in time for a transpacific flight and couldn't put it down – it was compelling enough to gift to a friend, and re-purchase in every format available!Her journey from a young immigrant to a titan in AI, the brain behind ImageNet and HAI, is nothing short of a testament to unyielding perseverance. Having experienced her talks at Stanford's AI Lab during my tenure as a visiting scholar, I can attest that her narrative mirrors her real-life brilliance. This memoir is not just a read; it's a powerful reflection in AI's history, making - 'The Worlds I See' is an unputdownable tribute to a pioneer who reshaped technology.
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Top reviews from the United States

Spiegel
5.0 out of 5 stars Unbreakable perseverance
Reviewed in the United States on December 2, 2023
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In the book entitled The Worlds I see, the author Fei-Fei Li, PhD. gives a rare vista of her early childhood as a young girl growing up in an old China where boys were often preferred by the norm. She exemplified herself by excelling in everything she studied in elementary school. In high school, her father left the country for America while she hit a rough patch struggling to learn physics. That made her doubt her own ability to succeed in science. As she missed her father, she remembered the repair work that her father did around the house helped her realize everything he did was indeed related to physics. Then, suddenly everything became very clear in her mind and she quickly developed a profound interest in physics. When she and her ailing mother arrived in America, she was struggling with English after enrolling in an American high school in New Jersey. As she tried to get help from a math teacher in her class, she developed a strong relationship with him not only helped her excel academically but assisted her family financially when her parents were struggling to start a laundry business. The said math teacher continued to be the most influential person in her college life and beyond.

In Princeton University, she continued to study physics as her favorite major until, with the encouragement from the high school math teacher, she participated as an assistant in a neuro research project at Stanford University one summer. That short engagement revealed her a clear path forthward to become a researcher in vision related endeavors. She then went to CalTech for her graduate studies because the advisor she met was also focusing on similar research interests in vision by enabling the computer to "see" things. During a meeting with her advisors at CalTech, she fixated on the number reported on a short paper that someone had successfully trained a neural network to recognize basic images with a small number of samples. Her advisor challenged her to scale up that number to many folds. After she became a professor at Princeton, she started a research project known as ImageNet as she was still fixated on that number that she saw at CalTech. The graduate student that was assigned to her was a top-notch problem solver. He single handedly automated the collection of images on the web. But the efforts still could take many years to finish because labeling those images required human interventions. As luck had it, she followed the advice from yet another graduate student to use crowdsourcing in order to scale up the image labeling efforts cheaply and efficiently within budget and she was able to complete the ImageNet within a year (similarly, recent crowdsourcing initiatives were pursued by BioBank to collect about 500,000 DNA samples from participants for studying genetic links to diseases and HappyWale to collect 100,000 photos of wales taken worldwide for training the tail recognition algorithm). Upon her completion of the ImageNet, other researchers piped her in the knowledge of WordNet that was built to automate natural language processing. That confluence of knowledge enabled her to begin her research on an image recognition project to describe what was seen in the picture in a short legible computer printed paragraph.

Her success in ImageNet had led to a position at Stanford University where she got all the resources that she needed to scale up her research. But her ailing mother suffered a heart problem. After surgery, she was puzzled by her mother's refusal to comply with any physical therapy requirements to get well and led to yet another unnecessary surgery. She kept talking to her mother to inquire about the real reason behind. Her patience paid off when her mother eventually confided to her that she felt losing the control of her own body when everybody was telling her to do this and that and she couldn't take it any more. That revelation opened up yet a new frontier for her research in human centered AI to design a system that is humane to people.

From her book, it made me realize that a PhD degree is not just a fancy scholastic degree to show off. It is a serious pursuit of knowledge. People could only do that with perseverance, uninterruptible attention, and insatiable desires to get down to the bottom of things rather than just scratching the surface. Additionally, her story demonstrated the financial sacrifice that she and her family had to make for her to stay in academics instead of taking a lucrative job in the financial world. Her mother was always steadfast in supporting her interest in working as a scientist even though the pay wasn't high enough when she tried to find a way to boost the living standard in the family while both parents weren't working due to her mother's illness and her father's lack of English skills to land a viable job to support the family.
27 people found this helpful
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J. W. Deming
5.0 out of 5 stars A very moving human story about a brilliant, restlessly curious mind
Reviewed in the United States on April 4, 2024
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I read many books about and by scientific innovators. For instance, I've read every serious biography of Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Galois, Darwin, Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Gibbs, etc. I love this book. I am fascinated by this woman. No book written by or about a scientist has moved me the way Fei Fei Li's book has. She frequently brought me to tears as I read about the fierce curiosity that drove her to pursue one important field of knowledge after another (degree in physics, graduate degree in EE, reading great literature, studying important works of are, etc.) until she found her passion. She's focused on figuring out (a) how the human mind works and (b) can we create human-level or better artificial intelligence. Ms Li faced and overcame difficulties that would have wilted 99% of today's American young people. And all with a grounded, upbeat attitude that redefines "refreshing." If you're interested in understanding how the rare true scientific mind arises from the most surprising backgrounds, read this book. If you love a grand adventure with cliffhanger after cliffhanger, read this book. If you love reading biographies of major scientific innovators as much as I do, read this book. If you want to be moved by the story of a young girl, an immigrant who could barely speak English when she arrived in Parsippany, NJ at age 15 or 16, and who has become on of the world's leading AI researchers, read this book. If you want to develop a scientific laymen's understanding of AI, read this book. If you want to be inspired to pursue your passion against all odds, read this book. Got it? Read this book.
16 people found this helpful
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Steve Yang
5.0 out of 5 stars A truly A.I. book full of humanity
Reviewed in the United States on January 27, 2024
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The A.I. here for me stands for “Amazing and Inspirational” - A book written by someone whom I share some immigration experience (partially with her parents and partially with herself ) was what it got me wanting to check out this book (pre-ordered actually), but it turned out way more than just an immigrant scientist’s story.

It’s amazing because it felt not like a book written by a top-notch computer scientist whom we usually associate with nerdiness and non-artistic, but by a crafty fiction writer or novelist who managed to carry her readers through emotional up and down as her journey as an immigrant, a foreign student, a laundromat assistant operator, a Princeton student and scholar, and now a world-renown AI scientist, progressed, with powerful and beautiful narratives.

It’s inspirational as it is a story of an immigrant family that faced the typical daunting challenges - languages, foreign environment, physical and fiscal poverty, but was able to overcome them with hardworking, self-discipline, perseverance, and the invaluable helps and loves from other kind-hearted people like the Sabellas family as permanently presented throughout the book. The inspiration drawn from this book is much more than an immigrant student who loves science and made it to top, it’s the author’s humility to account for those who had helped make her to the top.

Over the years I had read many books and articles about the promise and perils of Artificial Intelligence (back to the original AI) , but I would say that this book, not only by the scientist who contributed significantly to the uprising of AGI (most notably through her work of creating the ImageNet with her student Dr. Jia Deng) hooked me as the most artistically and humanly narrated. Yes, Human-Centered AI, it must be the way to go!

Looking forward to the sequel as it was lightly hinted at the end of the book.
8 people found this helpful
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96bx32
5.0 out of 5 stars Human AI
Reviewed in the United States on April 28, 2024
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I like to understand the foundations of any technology and this book clearly articulated the recent growth of AI tools and techniques. The second theme of personal experiences and sacrifices that is overlaid across the book had great pieces of wisdom.
One person found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Will Liu
5.0 out of 5 stars Good reading about a successful story of an immigrant to US, middle-class to poor to middle-class.
Reviewed in Canada on March 31, 2024
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Good reading about a successful story of an immigrant to US, middle-class to poor to middle-class.
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Riza Mohammad khan
5.0 out of 5 stars must read
Reviewed in India on April 27, 2024
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Found it really educating, exciting and lovely. It is as if I have witnessed entire life of Dr Li nd what happened ai
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Collin M.
5.0 out of 5 stars A humble, entertaining, and inspiring book
Reviewed in Germany on February 3, 2024
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I'm with the other positive reviewers on this one. Fei-Fei Li's autobiography is something special.

I would like to point out one thing that I continuously thought while reading the book. It's not every day you read a book by someone so accomplished who doesn't make it all about them.

Li talks about the people who've helped her along the way and the teams she's worked with. It's clear she's good at bringing folks together and pointing them in the right direction, but she doesn't brag about it.

The book isn't just about her, it's about progress in science and the importance of teamwork. It's not just about one person's achievements, but about how we all move forward together - in personal and in professional life.

In short, Li's book is a refreshing read that puts the spotlight on the people behind the scenes and the power of teamwork. It's a nice reminder that success is a group effort.
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茂＆次郎
5.0 out of 5 stars A must !
Reviewed in Japan on February 23, 2024
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The book excited me (a Japanese at the age of 64) so much that I want to write a review comprehensively from three viewpoints: first, her own and her parents' journeys for North Star - I am now confident in believing her commitment to the US and the democratic world. Second, her research of AI - I appreciate she addresses Dr.Fukushima. And, finally, her challenge in apply AI to society in the form of 'human-centered' technology - I get a suggestion about coexistence of people and technology.
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Dennis Layton
5.0 out of 5 stars It is the new The Soul of A New Machine
Reviewed in Canada on March 3, 2024
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Not since the 80's when I read the book, The Soul of A New Machine have I had the same sense of wonder at the complexity of what was unfolding and what it would mean for the future of humankind.
2 people found this helpful
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