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

ONE OF BARACK OBAMA'S RECOMMENDED BOOKS ON AI * FINANCIAL TIMES BEST BOOKS OF 2023

From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" (Financial Times).

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.

About the Author

Dr. Fei-Fei Li is the inaugural Sequoia Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and Co-Director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute. She was VP at Google and served as Chief Scientist of AI/ML at Google Cloud. She is co-founder the non-profit AI4ALL, which works to promote AI education among students from all walks of life. Dr. Li has served as a keynote speaker at the World Economic Forum and at TED. She received the 2025 Webby Lifetime Achievement Award for her pioneering contributions to fundamental AI research and her efforts to promote a human-centered approach to technology. Work from her lab has been featured in the NYT, WSJ, Financial Times and more. She lives in San Francisco.