Published May 29, 2025
By : Staff Writer
In April 2025, the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences announced the winners for the 29th Annual Webby Awards, which included boundary-pushing cultural icons, companies, and organizations shaping today’s ever-expansive online world.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li, who WOC Magazine recognized in spring 2024 as one of the "2024 Women of the Year" for her contributions to building extensive knowledge bases for machine learning and visual understanding, received a lifetime achievement award at the 2025 Webby Awards.
More recently, Dr. Li appeared as a guest on Firing Line. This long-running television program revisited lessons from a 1996 episode discussing the regulatory framework that emerged alongside the internet.
Known as the "godmother of AI," Fei-Fei Li shared with host Margaret Hoover that as her laboratory worked on computer vision—teaching computers to see and create—she envisioned both significant risks and benefits associated with the technology.
Pragmatic as always, Li compared AI to fire, stating that humans learn from a young age both its utility and its potential dangers.
Consequently, she argued that the misuse of AI among young people should be seen as a failure of education and training, rather than a flaw inherent in AI itself.
"Every technology is a double-edged sword," said Li, who founded the Stanford University Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute to maintain a focus on enhancing human lives.
During the 2023 U.S. Senate citation featured in the "Firing Line" episode, Li emphasized the need for Congress to create guardrails for the use of artificial intelligence (AI).
Drawing a parallel to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), she noted that the FDA plays a crucial role in ensuring the safety of foods and drugs for consumers.
Similarly, as we advance towards the development of self-driving cars, we require a regulatory framework that addresses modern transportation needs.
As the number of vehicles on the road increased, so did the number of road crashes; however, the solution was not to shut down auto manufacturers like Ford or General Motors, but rather to implement safety measures such as seatbelts and other technologies to assist drivers and passengers.
Li argued that a solid regulatory framework would help strike a balance between innovation and safety.
She insisted that scientific discovery should receive as much funding and encouragement in academia as it does in private corporate laboratories.
While the United States has a robust private sector, many technologies available to the public stem from a healthy ecosystem of public funding and academic research.
A significant amount of high-quality training occurs in universities, which produce many of the scientists, technologists, engineers, and mathematicians driving AI development.
Li emphasized that the government has a role in investing in basic science since curiosity-driven research in academic settings yields public benefits.
Li stated that there are no independent machine values—machine values are, in fact, human values.
This is why AI has the potential to enhance the human condition, as most tools are developed with that purpose in mind, even as powerful militaries deploy AI.
Moreover, the generation that introduced this technology continues to utilize AI for drug discovery, enhancing patient safety, analyzing vast amounts of data, and facilitating more efficient government operations.
Nonetheless, algorithmic bias can only be mitigated when individuals in a technical system curate datasets, label data, and design algorithms that reflect a common-sense understanding of their downstream applications.
Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Stanford University and serves as co-director of Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute.
She was the director of Stanford's Artificial Intelligence Laboratory from 2013 to 2018.
During her sabbatical from Stanford, from January 2017 to September 2018, she worked as Vice President and Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud.
Li's research interests encompass cognitively inspired AI, machine learning, deep learning, computer vision, robotic learning, and AI in healthcare, with a particular focus on ambient intelligent systems for healthcare delivery.
She has also previously worked in cognitive and computational neuroscience.
One of her significant achievements is the invention of ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a crucial large-scale dataset that has significantly advanced the development of deep learning and AI
Furthermore, she has actively collaborated with policymakers to ensure the responsible use of technology, providing testimony to the U.S. Senate and Congress. Additionally, she serves as a special advisor to the Secretary-General of the United Nations.
Dr. Li is an elected member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), the National Academy of Medicine (NAM), and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS).
She is also the author of the book The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, and Discovery at the Dawn of AI, published by Macmillan Publishers in 2023.
"Artificial Intelligence Must Benefit Humanity"
— The Webby Awards (@TheWebbyAwards) May 13, 2025
The brilliant @drfeifei closes out the 29th Annual #Webbys by accepting her 2025 Webby Lifetime Achievement Award, presented to her by @karaswisher 🏆🌟💡#5wordspeech #drfeifeili #artificialintelligence #ai #ethicalai pic.twitter.com/4Y7YKfh5Xh
“AI is too important to be owned by private industry alone” says @drfeifei, co-founder of @StanfordHAI, as artificial intelligence research shifts to the private sector and academia is drained of resources.
— Firing Line with Margaret Hoover (@FiringLineShow) May 27, 2025
"This is where I get worried because a lot of good training is done in… pic.twitter.com/4PlYMEDH40
Drum roll 🥁 @StanfordHAI ‘s annual #AIIndex2025 is out! This is one of the most trusted annual reports on the state of AI globally. Everyone interested in AI should read this! https://t.co/0AOphJBola
— Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) April 8, 2025
After 3+ years, today is the day that my book “The Worlds I See” gets to see the world itself. It is a science memoir of the intertwining histories of me becoming an #AI scientist, and the making of the modern AI itself. All versions are now on Amazon https://t.co/1oH2vCjovu 1/ pic.twitter.com/BtttQaJsCg
— Fei-Fei Li (@drfeifei) November 7, 2023
