Dr. Fei Fei Li: preference

Transcript context

…Yeah. You mentioned this point that I want to come back to that if you just look over the course of your career, you were at all of the major collections of humans that led to so many of the breakthroughs that are happening today. Obviously, we talk about ImageNet also just SAIL at Stanford is where a lot of the work happened, Google Cloud, which a lot of the breakthroughs happened. What brought you to those places? Like for people looking for how to advance in their career, be at the center of the future, just is there a through line there of just what pulled you from place to place and pulled you into those groups that might be helpful for people to hear? Yeah, this is actually a great question, Lenny, because I do think about it, and obviously we talked about it's curiosity and passion that brought me to AI, that is more a scientific north star, right? I did not care if AI was a thing or not, so that was one part. But how did I end up choosing in the particular places I work in, including starting World Labs, is I think I'm very grateful to myself or maybe to my parents' genes. I'm an intellectually very fearless person, and I have to say when I hire young people, I look for that because I think that's a very important quality if one wants to make a difference, is that when you want to make a difference, you have to accept that you're creating something new or you're diving into something new. People haven't done that. And if you have that self-awareness, you almost have to allow yourself to be fearless and to be courageous. So when I, for example, came to Stanford, in the world of academia, I was very close to this thing called tenure, which is have the job forever at Princeton. But I chose to come to Stanford because... I love Princeton. It's by alma mater. It's just at that moment there are people who are so amazing at Stanford and the Silicon Valley ecosystem was so amazing that I was okay to take a risk of restarting my tenure clock. Becoming the first female director of SAIL, I was actually relatively speaking a very young faculty at that time, and I wanted to do that because I care about that community. I didn't spend too much time thinking about all the failure cases. Obviously, I was very lucky that the more senior faculty supported me, but I just wanted to make a difference. And then going to Google was similar. I wanted to work with people like Jeff Dean, Jeff Hinton, and all these incredible demists, the incredible people. The same with World Labs. I have this passion. And I also believe that people with the same mission can do incredible things. So that's how it guided my through line. I don't overthink of all possible things that can go wrong because that's too many. I feel like an important element of this is not focusing on the downside, focusing more on the people, the mission. What gets you excited, what do you think, the curiosity.…

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