Evidence receipt / belief
Published · transcript-backedDr. Fei Fei Li: belief
16 Nov 2025 Lenny's Podcast The Godmother of AI on jobs, robots, and why world models are next | Dr. Fei-Fei Li
“I do remember the companies, the tech companies, I am not going to name names, but I was in a conversation in one of the early days, I think is in the middle of 2015, middle of 2016, some tech companies avoid using the word AI because they were not sure if AI was a dirty word.”
Source trail
Everything needed to verify it.
- Speaker
- Dr. Fei Fei Li
- Attribution
- Verified speaker
- Claim type
- belief
- Recorded
- 16 Nov 2025
- Publisher
- Lenny's Podcast
Transcript context
…One of my other favorite takeaways from what you just shared is just such an example of high agency and just doing things that's kind of a meme on Twitter. Just you can just do things. You're just like, okay, this is probably necessary to move AI. And it's called machine learning back then, right? Was that the term most people used? I think it was interchangeably. It's true. I do remember the companies, the tech companies, I am not going to name names, but I was in a conversation in one of the early days, I think is in the middle of 2015, middle of 2016, some tech companies avoid using the word AI because they were not sure if AI was a dirty word. And I remember I was actually encouraging everybody to use the word AI because to me that is one of the most audacious question humanity has ever asked in our quest for science and technology, and I feel very proud of this term. But yes, at the beginning some people were not sure. What year was that roughly when AI was a dirty word?…
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