AI 'godmother' Fei-Fei Li says she is 'proud to be different' (www.bbc.co.uk)

Professor Fei‑Fei Li — widely dubbed the “godmother” of AI — is one of seven recipients of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, honoured alongside Yoshua Bengio, Geoffrey Hinton, Yann LeCun, Jensen Huang, Bill Dally and John Hopfield. Li, the only woman among the laureates, said she embraces the title as a visibility win for women in tech. The award recognises their collective role in building modern machine learning; Li’s contribution is ImageNet, the large-scale labeled image dataset her lab produced that “opened the floodgate” for data‑driven computer vision and accelerated advances across AI research and industry. Technically, ImageNet’s scale and standardized benchmarks enabled deep convolutional networks to leap in accuracy and generality, effectively kickstarting much of today’s vision stack. Li, now co‑director of Stanford’s Human‑Centered AI Institute and CEO of World Labs, says the next major milestone is embodied, interactive AI — systems that can perceive and act in the physical world — which could amplify creativity, robotic learning, design and architecture. She also urges pragmatic, science‑based public communication about AI risks, noting healthy debate among pioneers (some of whom warn of existential threats while others see less danger). This year’s prize is the first time all seven laureates have gathered in person, underscoring both the field’s rapid progress and its unresolved questions about safety and societal impact.