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

by Fei-Fei Li

Turing’s vision was shared by his fellow computer scientists in America, who codified their curiosity in 1956 with a now famous Dartmouth College research proposal in which the term “artificial intelligence” was coined.

although many of AI’s founding contributors would go on to explore an eclectic range of fields, including psychology and cognitive science, their backgrounds were almost exclusively centered on mathematics, electrical engineering, and physics itself.

physics

contributors. In 1959, McCarthy and Minsky founded

What truly made backpropagation profound, however, were the changes that would emerge within the network’s structure over time.

it was Geoff Hinton, one of his two coauthors, who would become the figure most associated with backpropagation. Hinton, then a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, was captivated from an early age by the enigma of intelligence and had dedicated his career to exploring new methods for reproducing it.

Finally, Yann LeCun, one of Hinton’s first students, famously applied it all to an impressively practical task: reading handwritten ZIP codes. In less than a decade, machine learning had progressed from a tenuous dream to a triumph in the real world.

The more I learned, the more the story of the founding of the country reminded me of what I loved most about physics.

Benjamin Franklin, himself a practicing scientist, the comparison was more than merely metaphorical.

“Mr. Sabella, can you recommend some books for me?” “You mean math books?” “No, any kind. Reading helps my English.”

“Do you know who Arthur C. Clarke is? He’s one of my favorite science fiction authors. I think you might like him, too.” “Ah, science fiction! Yes! I also love … uh…”

I wasn’t the only student who visited the Math Lab for help after class, but I soon became its most frequent visitor, and Mr. Sabella seemed to respect my appetite for learning. Likewise, I appreciated his patience; earning an immigrant’s trust can be a delicate task, but his dedication won me over.

But there was one top-tier school I couldn’t stop thinking about: Princeton. Fate had brought me to New Jersey, an hour’s drive from a place Einstein called home, and my day trip to the campus still replayed often in my mind.

When the response arrived on a particularly chilly December afternoon, however, it didn’t appear that money would be my obstacle in attending.

Mr. Sabella’s mentorship helped me rediscover a sense of dignity and reminded me that friendship—trust—was possible for outsiders, too.

There were moments on autumn afternoons like this that Princeton seemed like something I’d dreamt.

I’d lived in an immigrant community full of bright, hardworking people who’d never climbed a rung on the ladder of economic fortune.

A community that offered a place, however modest, for an immigrant family to build a life. Teachers who encouraged a student who barely spoke English, one of whom made her struggles his personal priority. An Ivy League school that offered her an education.

More and more, I was feeling something I hadn’t in a long time: I was grateful.

Particularly memorable was Eric Wieschaus, a professor leading a genetics seminar that exposed freshmen to the bleeding edge of the field.

“I really hate to do this, everyone, but I’m afraid that today’s lecture will end about thirty minutes early, uh, because … well, I guess some of you might have already heard…”

“I got the phone call this morning that Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard, Edward B. Lewis, and I … well, we’ve been awarded the Nobel Prize in Medicine this year.”

Particularly memorable was the final lecture of the class. He lowered the lights, projected the now famous photo of the Hubble Telescope’s deep field imaging of the distant universe, and spoke to us with a voice so resonant it felt like a call from the depths of the cosmos.

“Take a breath, everyone. Just … let this photo wash over you.” His

Stay curious. Stay bold. Be forever willing to ask impossible questions.

Building on the modest sewing skills she’d developed making clothes for me in Chengdu, she took it upon herself to turn a hobby into a profession, learning diligently on the job. And it worked.

Even our earliest customers—people who were, essentially, handing their clothes to a complete amateur—never knew. She developed the skill quickly and invisibly, keeping her cool and working methodically to fix the mistakes she made early on, earning repeat business and lasting loyalty within a year. My father found a way to contribute as well. The shop’s many machines were like a playground to him, and he made a regular habit of servicing the boiler, presses, clothing conveyor, and dry-cleaning machine. Over time, his passion for tinkering translated into thousands of dollars in savings on repairs, and even grew creative; among his more inspired touches was a network of wires and hooks installed throughout the shop to serve as scaffolding for ivy and other climbing plants. It made the interior unexpectedly lush and green, delighting customers while indulging his love for nature.

But there were advantages to living such a sequestered life.

I lived for the moments when a clearing in the crowd revealed an unexpected glimpse of a pioneering physicist like John Wheeler, or a cutting-edge string theory researcher like Edward Witten. The sightings were made all the more surreal for how prosaic they were: titans of their fields rounding a staircase, reaching for a napkin while juggling hors d’oeuvres, or nodding along with small talk. Giants inhabiting a slice of life as mundane as any of my own.

I wondered if it was really physics per se that so inspired me, or simply the spirit that motivated physics—the courage that spurred some of history’s brightest minds to ask such brazen questions about our world.

Erwin Schrödinger was among my favorite examples. Despite a career spent at the forefront of twentieth-century quantum mechanics, his short but profound What Is Life? examined genetics, the behavior of living organisms, and even the ethical implications of their study.

The book had a lasting impact on me,

“Learning a new language,” she said, “is like opening a door to a new world.”

An almost magical paradigm in engineering had arrived, in which organic, human-like perception could be engineered as deliberately as a database or file server.

Whatever neural networks were fated to achieve, it was becoming clear their time had not yet arrived. Before long, a period known as an “AI winter” had set in—a long season of austerity for a now unmoored research community. Even the term “artificial intelligence” itself—seen by many as hopelessly broad, if not delusional—was downplayed in favor of narrower pursuits like decision-making, pattern recognition, and natural language processing, which attempted to understand human speech and writing.

The history of art is a testament to the primacy of vision—and to our growing appreciation of its nuances over the course of centuries, from the cave paintings that heralded the dawn of a new form of communication, to the flood of creativity that burst forth during the Renaissance, to today’s world of photography, film, television, and even video games.

I was courted by Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch, and other firms with names one could imagine engraved in stately slabs of marble. And they offered everything: perks, leadership opportunities, eye-watering starting salaries, and, of course, real health insurance.

“Fei-Fei, is it what you want?” “You know what I want, Mom. I want to be a scientist.” “So what are we even talking about?”

My Princeton professors often said that postgraduate studies weren’t just another academic milestone but a turning point, representing the first transition from being a student to becoming something like a true scientist, turning a passion into a journey and an affinity into an identity, tempering an education to become the foundation of a career, a reputation, and a life.

My experience at UC Berkeley brought to life the mystery of intelligence and showed me that a greater understanding of vision might be the key to unraveling it. Two paths extended from that realization, however: one neuroscientific, promising greater and greater insights into the brain’s capabilities, and the other computational, in which the fundamentals of engineering could be applied to modeling, and perhaps even replicating, those capabilities.

Scratching Stanford off the list, I turned to an alternative program at MIT that felt even more aligned with my interests.

Still, I had one more option to consider: the California Institute of Technology, more commonly known as Caltech.

From the moment I touched down in Pasadena, it was clear that Caltech had the advantage when it came to climate.

I was struck by its photogenic charm as well, from its flowers that appeared to bloom in every direction to its turtle ponds and their lazily sunning inhabitants. MIT and Stanford were unimpeachable when it came to scholastics, but this place felt like paradise.

Everything I saw and felt during my visit to Caltech suggested this was where I belonged.

The puzzle of vision is about much more than understanding how we see. It isn’t simply a question of colors or shapes, or even of number crunching at ever-larger scales.

It’s an investigation into a phenomenon at the very core of our cognition, from which so much of who and what we are springs forth, biologically, interpersonally, and culturally.

It’s a journey to the most foundational layers of...

An early step toward that understanding came from the pages of my textbook Vision Science, with the introduction of the Princeton psychologist Anne Treisman.

Submitted by the neuroscientist Simon Thorpe to the Letters section of a 1996 volume of the journal Nature, the article was short—only three pages—but thunderous in its findings. Even its matter-of-fact title, “Speed of Processing in the Human Visual System,”

I explained the interview, the job offer, and everything else. I told her about the perks, and the starting salary, and the way they’d already sweetened the offer before I’d even had a chance to respond. I explained that it was, for all intents and purposes, a fast track to the kind of career every immigrant mother imagines for their child. She listened politely, but I saw a familiar look on her face well before I finished speaking. “Are we really going to have this conversation again?”