Evidence receipt / recommendation
Published · transcript-backedBuilt ImageNet.
16 Nov 2025 Lenny's Podcast The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li
“That to me was not bitter; it was a sweet lesson. That's why I built ImageNet because I believe that big data plays that role. So why can't bitter lesson work in robotics alone?”
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Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Dr. Fei Fei Li
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- recommendation
- Recorded
- 16 Nov 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…Amazing. Okay, so I asked him what I should ask you about and he suggested ask you why is the bitter lesson alone not likely to work for robots? So first of all, just explain what the bitter lesson was in the history of AI and then just why that won't get us to where we want to be with robots. Well, first of all, there are many bitter lessons, but the bitter lessons everybody refers to is a paper written by Richard Sutton who won the Turing Award recently, and he does a lot of reinforcement learning. And Richard has said, if you look at the history, especially the algorithmic development of AI, it turns out simpler model with a ton of data always win at the end of the day instead of the more complex model with less data. I mean, that was actually... This paper came years after ImageNet. That to me was not bitter; it was a sweet lesson. That's why I built ImageNet because I believe that big data plays that role. So why can't bitter lesson work in robotics alone? Well, first of all, I think we need to give credit to where we are today. Robotics is very much in the early days of experimentation. The research is not nearly as mature as say language models. So many people are still experimenting with different algorithms and some of those algorithms are driven by big data. So I do think big data will continue to play a role in robotics, but what is hard for robotics, there are a couple of things. One is that it's harder to get data. It's a lot harder to get data. You can say, well, there's web data. This is where the latest robotics research is using web videos. And I think web videos do play a role. But if you think about what made language model worth a very... As someone who does computer vision and spatial intelligence and robotics, I'm very jealous of my colleagues in language because they had this perfect setup where their training data are in words, eventually tokens, and then they produce a model that outputs words. So you have this perfect alignment between what you hope to get, which we call objective function and what your training data looks like. But robotics is different. Even spatial intelligence is different. You hope to get actions out of robots, but your training data lacks actions in 3D worlds, and that's what robots have to do, right? Actions in 3D worlds. So you have to find different ways to fit a, what do they call, a square in a round hole, that what we have is tons of web videos. So then we have to start talking about adding supplementing data such as teleoperation data or synthetic data so that the robots are trained with this hypothesis of bitter lesson, which is large amount of data. I think there's still hope because even what we are doing in world modeling will really unlock a lot of this information for robots. But I think we have to be careful because we're at the early days of this and bitter lesson is still to be tested because we haven't fully figured out the data for. Another part of the bitter lesson of robotics I think we should be so realistic about is again, compared to language models or even spatial models, robots are physical systems. So robots are closer to self-driving cars than a large language model. And that's very important to recognize. s again, compared to language models or even spatial models, robots are physical systems. So robots are closer to self-driving cars than a large language model. And that's very important to recognize. That means that in order for robots to work, we not only need brains, we also need the physical body. We also need application scenarios. If you look at the history of self-driving car, my colleague Sebastian Thrun took Stanford's car to win the first DARPA challenge in 2006 or 2005. It's 20 years since that prototype of a self-driving car being able to drive 130 miles in the Nevada desert to today's Waymo and on the street of San Francisco. And we're not even done yet. There's still a lot. So that's a 20-year journey. And self-driving cars are much simpler robots, they're just metal boxes running on 2D surfaces, and the goal is not to touch anything. Robot is 3D things running in 3D world, and the goal is to touch things. So the journey is going to be, there's many aspects, elements, and of course one could say, well, the self-driving car, early algorithm were pre deep learning era. So deep learning is accelerating the brains. And I think that's true. That's why I'm in robotics, that's why I'm in spatial intelligence and I'm excited by it. But in the meantime, the car industry is very mature and productizing also involves the mature use cases, supply chains, the hardware. So I think it's a very interesting time to work in these problems. But it's true, Ben is right. We might still be subject to a number of bitter lessons.…
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