AI ‘godmother’ Fei-Fei Li says she is ‘proud to be totally different’ | EUROtoday

The ‘godmother’ of AI, Professor Fei-Fei Li has advised the BBC that being the one girl amongst seven pioneers of synthetic Intelligence being introduced with a high engineering prize by the King immediately makes her “proud to be different”.

The King will current the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering to Prof Li and 6 others throughout a ceremony at St James’s Palace.

Those honoured alongside her are Prof Yoshua Bengio, Dr Bill Dally, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, Prof John Hopfield, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang and Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Dr Yann LeCun.

They are being recognised for his or her contributions to the event of recent machine studying, a subject that underpins the speedy development of AI.

Dr Hinton, Prof Bengio and Yann LeCun, presently Chief AI Scientist at Meta have extensively been recognised because the “Godfathers of AI” since they had been collectively awarded the 2018 Turing Award.

There is nevertheless just one so-called “godmother” of AI and Prof Li advised the BBC she has grown to just accept the moniker.

“I would not call myself godmother of anything,” she stated.

She stated just a few years in the past when individuals began calling her that, she needed to “pause and recognise if I rejected this, it would miss an opportunity for women scientists and technologists to be recognised this way”.

“Because men are pretty easily called godfathers or founding fathers.”

“For all the young women I work with and the generations of girls to come, I’m okay now accepting this title,” she added.

Born in China, Prof Li emigrated to the US as an adolescent and went on to excel in pc science. She is co-director at Stanford Computer Science Department, and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.

It is her work on ImageNet a undertaking which enabled main advances in pc imaginative and prescient for which she is recognised.

She and her college students created large-scale picture recognition datasets upon which loads of synthetic intelligence know-how is now constructed. It paved the best way for pc imaginative and prescient – understanding how computer systems might ‘see’.

She says the significance of that information set “open the floodgate of data-driven AI”.

She thinks the subsequent AI milestone will come when it is ready to work together with the world round it.

This capacity was is “innately important and native to animals and humans”, and if this may very well be unlocked in AI, it might “superpower” people in some ways, “including creativity, robotic learning, design and architecture”.

This would be the first time all seven laureates have come collectively in individual.

The three “godfathers” have publicly acknowledged opposing views on how harmful AI may very well be.

Dr Hinton has repeatedly expressed critical issues concerning the potential for AI to pose an “extinction-level threat”. But Prof LeCun, who additionally works at Meta has written that apocalyptic warnings are overblown.

Prof Li says she takes a extra “pragmatic approach” and says the disagreement amongst scientists is “healthy”.

“We’re used to even disagreement, and I think that’s healthy. A topic as profound and impactful as AI requires a lot of healthy debate and public discourse.

“I feel within the case of AI, each excessive rhetorics concern me…I’ve all the time advocated for a way more science based mostly, pragmatic technique in speaking and educating the general public.

“So, yes, I would like to see our communication of AI to be much more moderated and grounded in facts and science instead of the extreme rhetorics”.

The Queen Elizabeth prize is awarded yearly to engineers accountable for groundbreaking improvements which globally profit humanity. Previous recipients embody Sir Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web.

Lord Vallance, chair of the Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering Foundation, stated the winners “represent the very best of engineering,” including that their work “demonstrates how engineering can both sustain our planet and transform the way we live and learn.”

Additional reporting by Philippa Wain