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AI 'godmother' Fei-Fei Li joins pioneers honored with top engineering prize
Professor Fei-Fei Li, the sole woman among seven artificial intelligence pioneers, will receive the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering alongside her peers in a ceremony at St James's Palace on Wednesday. The award recognizes their foundational contributions to modern machine learning, the backbone of today's AI advancements.
Honoring AI's trailblazers
King Charles III will present the prize to Li and six others: Professors Yoshua Bengio and Geoffrey Hinton, Dr. Bill Dally, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, Prof. John Hopfield, and Meta's Chief AI Scientist, Dr. Yann LeCun. Hinton, Bengio, and LeCun-often dubbed the "godfathers of AI"-shared the 2018 Turing Award for their work in deep learning.
Li, born in China and raised in the U.S., has carved her own path as the field's "godmother," a title she initially resisted. "A few years ago, when people started calling me that, I had to pause," she told the BBC. "If I rejected it, I'd miss a chance to highlight women in science." She now embraces the label for its symbolic power: "Men are easily called godfathers or founding fathers. For young women and future generations, I'm okay with it now."
Breaking barriers in computer vision
Li's groundbreaking work on ImageNet, a massive image-recognition dataset, revolutionized computer vision by enabling machines to "see" and interpret visual data. "That dataset opened the floodgate of data-driven AI," she explained. Today, she co-directs Stanford's Human-Centered AI Institute and leads World Labs, a startup focused on AI applications.
Looking ahead, Li predicts the next AI milestone will emerge when systems can interact dynamically with the physical world-a capability she calls "innately important" for humans and animals. Unlocking this potential could "superpower" creativity, robotics, and design, she said.
Divergent views on AI's risks
The laureates hold starkly different perspectives on AI's dangers. Hinton has warned of "extinction-level threats," while LeCun dismisses apocalyptic predictions as overblown. Li advocates for a "pragmatic, science-based" approach, urging moderation in public discourse. "Extreme rhetoric concerns me," she said. "Healthy debate is essential, but it must be grounded in facts."
"We're used to disagreement, and I think that's healthy. A topic as profound as AI requires robust debate-just not at the extremes."
Prof. Fei-Fei Li, Stanford University
Award legacy and global impact
The Queen Elizabeth Prize, awarded annually for engineering innovations that benefit humanity, has previously honored figures like Sir Tim Berners-Lee, creator of the World Wide Web. Lord Vallance, chair of the prize foundation, praised this year's winners as "the very best of engineering," noting their work's role in "sustaining our planet and transforming how we live."
Wednesday's ceremony marks the first time all seven laureates will gather in person, underscoring their collective influence on AI's trajectory.
