Mike Abbott, Partner of Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, sits with Dr. Fei Fei Li, Associate Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford, and the Director of the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab and the Stanford Vision Lab.
“I have been at Google for two months and it is actually the first time I took a deep dive into the industry and a very fortunate to have that sabbatical opportunity. I think a couple of things that really surprise but also excites me.. One thing is that as a technologist I’ve been doing AI for almost 20 years and you know in the early days started AI is a undergrad and PhD student and professor in the early days this is such a niche, small academically driven problem is the intellectual pursuit and then gradually we really this generation witness this technology at least of this wave maturing and making impact and solving real-world problem so our dream of AI started also to grow in the process and I came to the realization in the past few years that I were going to a lot of people called the fourth Industrial Revolution. I have absolutely no doubt that Artificial Intelligence is one of the biggest driving force of the Industrial Revolution were automation and many things are changing the way humans live at work. But there has always been a question for me, right around the time that I was considering my sabbatical industry is how do we democratize this technology?”
“So there are many reasons we wanted to democratize. First of all, it’s a good thing a lot of it is a good thing we want humanities to benefit from it. Second is; I think that I would now want AI to be in the fans of a few privileged that it lead democratizing it has, it helps us to really focus on the benevolent of effect of AI and this is where cloud comes in. It took me awhile but I started realized that cloud is the biggest computing platform humanity has ever created and and cloud what is computing today is to make your data speak intelligently and act intelligently to solve your problem or your customers’ problem so really that the marriage between AI and cloud is like this perfect vehicle to democratize AI.”
Do you think that Fourth wave (Artificial Intelligence) are being driven by computer, by some of these advances around using convolutional neural nets then is that also the tag label data? what are this kind of big factors that are often resulted in this fourth wave?
“I think the three major factors are the computer hardware I’m not only this huge infrastructure that clouds can provide but also the GPUs the remaining advancing hard work then 20 years ago internet brought us gradually the big data movement and big data and the availability of labeled an annotated big data is the second factor and then the third factor is advantage of the algorithm that is what I think academia have been doing the past AI has been the field of almost five to six decades but in the past 20 years so these three factors converged and brought us two days and I and and cloud will be the vehicle to democratize it.”
Dr Fei-Fei Li’s main research areas are in machine learning, deep learning, computer vision and cognitive and computational neuroscience. She has published more than 150 scientific articles in top-tier journals and conferences and invented ImageNet and the ImageNet Challenge, a critical large-scale dataset and benchmarking effort that has contributed to the latest developments in deep learning and AI. As of January 2017, Fei-Fei Li is spending her sabbatical at Google Cloud as Chief Scientist AI/ML.
