Fei-Fei Li, the esteemed 'godmother' of AI, expressed her pride in being the sole woman among seven pioneers of artificial intelligence when they were collectively honored with the prestigious 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering by the King. This recognition highlights her significant contributions to the field of modern machine learning, which underpins the rapid advancements in AI. The ceremony at St James's Palace also celebrated the achievements of Prof Yoshua Bengio, Dr Bill Dally, Dr Geoffrey Hinton, Prof John Hopfield, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, and Meta's Chief AI Scientist Dr Yann LeCun. These individuals have been widely acknowledged as the 'Godfathers of AI' since their joint 2018 Turing Award. However, Li's unique title of 'godmother' has evolved from a term she initially rejected, recognizing the need for women in science and technology to be recognized in the same manner as men. She now embraces this title, advocating for the empowerment of young women in STEM fields. Born in China and emigrating to the US as a teenager, Li excelled in computer science, becoming co-director of the Stanford Computer Science Department and co-founder and CEO of World Labs. Her groundbreaking work on ImageNet, a project enabling major advances in computer vision, has been pivotal. Li's contributions include creating large-scale image recognition datasets, paving the way for computer vision and data-driven AI. She envisions the next AI milestone as the ability to interact with the world, unlocking superpowers for humans in creativity, robotic learning, design, and architecture. The ceremony marks the first time all seven laureates have gathered in person, and it coincides with differing views on AI's potential dangers. While Dr. Hinton and Prof. LeCun have expressed concerns and optimism, respectively, Li advocates for a pragmatic approach, emphasizing the importance of healthy debate and fact-based communication in AI discourse. The Queen Elizabeth Prize, awarded annually for groundbreaking innovations benefiting humanity, further underscores the impact of these engineers' work.
