Fei-Fei Li, Stanford AI pioneer headed to AMD, learned her best lessons at yard sales and her family’s dry cleaner

On Hold:  Photo rights for her official Stanford HAI portrait are unconfirmed; her age, 50, comes from Wikipedia only, not an official bio.

Fei-Fei Li helped teach computers to see. Starting in 2007, she and her students built ImageNet, a collection of about 15 million hand-labeled pictures sorted into 22,000 categories. In 2012, researchers fed it to a neural network running on graphics chips, and the results stunned the field. Many people call that moment the birth of modern AI, the technology now behind photo search, self-driving research and chatbots.

Now the Stanford computer scientist is about to work for a Santa Clara chipmaker. On Sept. 28, AMD agreed to buy World Labs, the San Francisco startup she co-founded in 2024, in an all-stock deal worth about $8.2 billion. When the sale closes, expected by the end of the year, Li will become AMD’s executive vice president and chief scientist, reporting to CEO Lisa Su. On Nov. 12, the two shared a stage at the Conference on Robot Learning in Austin, Texas.

Ask Li where it all started, though, and she talks about bugs, yard sales and a dry-cleaning shop in New Jersey.

Named for a bird

Li, 50, was born in Beijing in 1976 and grew up in Chengdu, a city in southwestern China “very famous for panda bears,” she told podcast host Tim Ferriss last December. Even her name comes with a story. When her mother went into labor, her father was “characteristically late” bicycling to the hospital. Along the way, he caught a bird. “He let it go, but he did catch a bird,” Li said. “I don’t know if he was just distracted.” Fei means flying.

Her father “loves insects more than equations for sure,” she said, and “finds humor and fun in unserious things.” On weekends, the two played in rice fields near water buffaloes, hunted for bugs and went to the mountains to draw. “My entire childhood memory of my dad is just a very unserious parent who had no interest in my grades,” she said.

She was not a typical kid either. She was a girl who loved physics, and she loved fighter jets “of all things.” She can still name her favorites.

Her mother brought the discipline. If homework was not finished by 6 p.m., there was no more homework allowed, and she had to live with the consequences. Her mother also has “zero technical genes,” Li said. “I sometimes still laugh at her. She cannot do math, let’s put it this way.”

Parsippany and a one-student calculus class

Her father left for the United States when she was 12. At 15, Li and her mother joined him in Parsippany, New Jersey. None of them spoke much English. The middle-class family became poor almost overnight. Her parents took menial jobs, and she worked in a neighborhood Chinese restaurant kitchen.

Even then, her father made the most of it. On weekends, they hunted yard sales for cheap household goods, and he treated every table like a treasure hunt. “Oh my God, Fei-Fei, come and look at this cup. It has a owl on it,” she recalled him saying on Microsoft’s Tools and Weapons podcast. Decades later, she realized that childlike delight in seeing something for the first time is exactly what a scientist needs.

At Parsippany High School, a math teacher named Bob Sabella befriended the lonely student who was still learning English. He talked with her about books, culture and science fiction, and his family became her American family. When the school could not offer the advanced calculus class she needed, he gave up his only lunch hour to teach it to her, one student at a time. “Later as I became teacher myself, it’s exhausting to teach all day long,” Li said. She calls public school teachers “the unsung heroes of our society,” and she wrote her 2023 memoir, The Worlds I See, in part to celebrate him. She graduated from Parsippany High in 1995. The school inducted her into its hall of fame in 2017.

Founding CEO of a dry cleaner

Li enrolled at Princeton University, where she majored in physics, the field of her “biggest hero,” Albert Einstein.

Her mother’s heart was failing, and the family needed steady money. So when she started at Princeton, she borrowed enough money to open a small dry-cleaning shop in Parsippany. Li ran it for about seven years. “In Silicon Valley language, I was the CEO of the dry cleaner, and I employed my parents,” she said. Like most dry cleaners, it did its business on weekends, so she studied physics during the week and worked at the shop on weekends. She calls it “a tale of two towns.”

The two lives collided often. During her freshman year, her mother needed a heart procedure in which she stayed partly awake, and Li was the only one who could translate for her. Princeton let her take an exam at the hospital so she could stay close. Li does not tell the story for sympathy. She calls those years “a love story for immigration.”

She graduated in 1999 with high honors in physics. It was a bull market, and physics majors were getting Wall Street job offers. Instead, a $20,000 Martin A. Dale fellowship from Princeton took her to Tibet to study traditional Tibetan medicine. She has called it “the most memorable year of my life.”

A mother who said, ‘Go for what you love’

Li earned a master’s degree and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at the California Institute of Technology. In the hardest stretch of her Ph.D., with her mother uninsured and AI still a field with few jobs, McKinsey offered her a job. The salary was more than her family had ever seen in this country, and she wavered.

Her mother did not. Li remembers her saying, “Go for what you love. What are you agonizing about?” Li stayed in science. When the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign offered her a job as an assistant professor, “I suddenly was so happy,” she told the Freakonomics podcast. “I’m like, ‘Look, I got a job in science. Forget about the other thing.’”

Fifteen million pictures

She moved on to Princeton’s faculty in 2007 and to Stanford in 2009. ImageNet grew out of a hunch that went against the thinking of the time:  the missing ingredient was not a cleverer algorithm but far more data. To label millions of images, her team hired online workers through Amazon Mechanical Turk. That raised a funny problem. If workers are paid to find pandas, what stops them from finding a panda in every picture? Her team gave workers quizzes on what a panda is and slipped in test images with known answers to catch anyone faking it.

At Stanford, she directed the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab from 2013 to 2018 and became a founding co-director of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. She is the inaugural Sequoia Professor of computer science. She took a sabbatical to serve as a Google vice president and chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud in 2017 and 2018, and she co-founded AI4ALL, a nonprofit that works to bring more young people from different backgrounds into AI.

The honors have piled up:  election to the National Academy of Engineering, the National Academy of Medicine and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences; the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering; and a spot among Time’s 2025 Persons of the Year, the “Architects of AI.” In 2024, The Tech Interactive in San Jose gave her its James C. Morgan Global Humanitarian Award.

No trophies on the wall

Visitors will not find those awards on display. Her parents never cared whether she brought prizes home, and the habit stuck. “My own house, my own office have zero of those decorations of achievements or awards,” she said.

What lights her up instead is curiosity, which she calls “a state of being.” “If my students walk into my office talking about science, it’s absolutely my best moment,” she said. “Like, I just love it.”

Starting a company in her late 40s was, she admits, “a weird choice in this stage of my life.” People kept asking why. “The fundamental answer to that question is curiosity,” she said. World Labs builds AI that can generate and understand three-dimensional spaces, which she calls spatial intelligence. Its models generate, rebuild and simulate interactive 3D environments from text, images and video, work that could help train robots. At the Austin conference this week, she presented the company’s newest model, Atlas.

She is a practical boss. At World Labs, she said last year, she would not hire a software engineer who refuses to use AI coding tools, not because the tools are perfect, but because using them shows a person can keep learning. She is married to computer scientist Silvio Savarese, and they have two children.

She credits a long list of people for her success:  her parents, Sabella, her teachers, her students. “I am a story of this ecosystem, a story of a successful immigrant,” she said.

Ferriss asked what she would put on a billboard for the whole world to see. Her answer:  “What is your north star?”

Source:  Stanford Profiles, Fei-Fei Li; The Tim Ferriss Show transcript, episode 839; Tools and Weapons with Brad Smith transcript; Freakonomics, “My God, This Is a Transformative Power”; AMD, Sept. 28, 2026; CoRL 2026 keynotes.