The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI

The moving memoir of a scientist coming of age as an immigrant in America who finds her calling at the forefront of the AI revolution.

Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li "one of a tiny group of scientists--a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table--who are responsible for AI's recent remarkable advances."

Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China's middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.

Fei-Fei's adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities--and the extraordinary dangers--of the technology she loves.

The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century's defining moments from the inside. It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is--and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart.

Publisher: Flatiron Books: A Moment of Lift Book
Published: 11/07/2023
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.14lbs
Size: 9.41h x 6.51w x 0.94d
ISBN: 9781250897930


Review Citation(s):
Library Journal Prepub Alert 06/01/2023 pg. 17
Kirkus Reviews 10/01/2023
Publishers Weekly 10/02/2023
Booklist 10/15/2023 pg. 8

About the Author
Fei-Fei Li is a computer science professor at Stanford University and co-director of Stanford's Institute for Human-centered AI as well as a founder and chairperson of the board of nonprofit AI4ALL. She is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering, National Academy of Medicine, and American Academy of Arts and Sciences.