Fei-Fei Li: Spatial Intelligence is the Next Frontier in AI

A fireside with Dr. Fei-Fei Li on June 16, 2025 at AI Startup School in San Francisco. Dr. Fei-Fei Li is often called the godmother of AI—and for good reason. Before the world had AI as we know it, she was helping build the foundation. In this fireside, she recounts the creation of ImageNet, a project that helped ignite the deep learning revolution by providing the data backbone modern computer vision needed. She walks through the early belief in data-driven methods, the shock of seeing convolutional networks outperform expectations in 2012, and how those breakthroughs led to captioning, storytelling, and ultimately, generative models. Now, she’s taking on one of AI’s hardest frontiers: spatial intelligence. Fei-Fei shares why modeling the 3D world is essential for AGI—and why it may be even more difficult than language. Apply to Y Combinator: https://ycombinator.com/apply Work at a startup: https://workatastartup.com Chapters: 00:08 - The Origins of ImageNet 02:15 - The Dream to Make Machines See 03:28 - A paradigm shift in AI 04:42 - The Breakthrough Year: AlexNet and Deep Learning 08:00 - Evolving Computer Vision 12:20 - Building World Labs 13:00 - The next frontier in AI 14:20 - Why Spatial Intelligence Is Harder Than Language 18:40 - Technical Barriers for Vision-Based AI 20:00 - AI is more than LLMs 24:19 - Real-World Applications of World Models 25:50 - Fei Fei’s Journey 29:30 - Mentoring some of the legends of AI 33:00 - Audience Q&A