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People I (Mostly) Admire

118. “My God, This Is a Transformative Power”

People I (Mostly) Admire

Freakonomics Radio + Stitcher

Society & Culture

4.61.9K Ratings

🗓️ 11 November 2023

⏱️ 44 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Computer scientist Fei-Fei Li had a wild idea: download one billion images from the internet and teach a computer to recognize them. She ended up advancing the state of artificial intelligence — and she hopes that will turn out to be a good thing for humanity.

Transcript

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0:00.0

My guest today, Faye Faye Lee, is a professor of computer science at Stanford University.

0:10.0

Her early research led to massive advances in computer vision, one of the most important

0:14.4

subfields of artificial intelligence.

0:17.6

Not too many people were betting on what I was doing, for sure.

0:21.1

Welcome to people I mostly admire with Steve Lovett.

0:30.0

Faye Bailey continues to produce breakthroughs in computer vision research, but as a co-director of

0:35.6

Stanford's Human-centered AI Institute, she now spends much of her time trying to tame AI,

0:42.1

working to steer the technology and directions that will benefit rather than harm society.

0:50.0

Artificial intelligence is all the age these days.

0:53.4

But that is such a contrast to the early 1990s

0:56.4

when I was in graduate school.

0:58.2

I remember the consensus at that time,

1:00.9

at least in the circles that I ran in was that a bunch of the smartest people on

1:05.5

the planet had wasted a lot of time back in the 1960s and 70s and 80s on AI and if I had said I wanted to pursue AI, everyone around me would have tried to talk me out of it.

1:19.0

So you're probably lucky to be younger than me so that by the time you came of age there was more optimism about

1:24.4

AI but did people try to talk you out of that career path as well? You know here's

1:29.1

the truth I didn't ask people. So I started my PhD in the year of 2000

1:37.0

and I didn't start it for artificial intelligence.

1:40.0

I started in computer vision and machine learning and then I enter grass school and I

1:46.2

realize oh there is another name to this field called AI and I like it, so here goes.

1:54.3

I think it's probably fair to say that some of AI's greatest successes and practical applications

2:00.4

to date have been in the area of computer vision in no small part because of your own

...

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