Professor Fei-Fei Li, the “godmother” of AI, told the BBC she was “proud to be different” as the only woman among seven artificial intelligence pioneers to be awarded the King’s highest engineering award today.
The King will present Professor Lee and six others with the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize in Engineering at a ceremony at St James’s Palace.
Joining her in the honor were Professor Joshua Bengio, Dr. Bill Daly, Dr. Jeffrey Hinton, Professor John Hopfield, Nvidia founder Jensen Huang, and Meta’s lead AI scientist Dr. Yann LeCun.
They are recognized for their contributions to the development of modern machine learning, a field that underpins rapid advances in AI.
Dr. Hinton, Professor Bengio, and Yann LeCun, who is currently Meta’s lead AI scientist, are widely known as the “godfathers of AI” since jointly winning the 2018 Turing Award.
But there is only one so-called “godmother” of AI, Professor Lee told the BBC, and she has grown to embrace that nickname.
“I don’t want to call myself the godmother of anything,” she said.
A few years ago, when people started making such calls to her, she said she had to stop and realize, “If I refused this, I would be missing out on the opportunity for women scientists and engineers to be recognized in this way.”
“Because men are easily called Godfathers and Founding Fathers.”
“For the sake of all the young women I work with and the generations of girls to come, I’m okay with accepting this title now,” she added.
Born in China, Professor Li immigrated to the United States as a teenager and excelled in computer science. She is co-director of Stanford University’s Department of Computer Science and co-founder and CEO of World Labs.
It was her work on the ImageNet project, which enabled major advances in computer vision, for which she is recognized.
She and her students created large-scale image recognition datasets that are now the basis for many artificial intelligence techniques. This paved the way for computer vision, figuring out how computers can “see.”
She says the importance of that dataset “opens the floodgates for data-driven AI.”
She believes the next AI milestone will come when AI is able to interact with the world around it.
This ability is “essentially important and innate to animals and humans,” and if unlocked by AI, it could give humans “superpowers” in a variety of areas, including “creativity, robotic learning, design, architecture, and more.”
This is the first time that all seven award winners will be together.
Three “godfathers” have publicly expressed opposing views on how dangerous AI is.
Dr. Hinton has repeatedly expressed serious concerns that AI could pose an “extinction-level threat.” But Professor LeCun, who also works for Meta, writes that apocalyptic warnings are overblown.
Professor Lee said he was taking a more “pragmatic approach” and said disagreements among scientists were “healthy”.
“We are used to even disagreement, and I think it is healthy. A topic as deep and impactful as AI requires a lot of healthy debate and public debate.
“In the case of AI, I find both extremes of rhetoric concerning…I have always advocated for more science-based and pragmatic methods of public communication and education.
“So, yes, I would like to see communication about AI be more moderate and based on facts and science rather than extreme rhetoric.”
The Queen Elizabeth Prize is awarded annually to engineers responsible for breakthrough innovations that benefit humanity globally. Previous winners include Sir Tim Berners-Lee, founder of the World Wide Web.
Lord Vallance, chairman of the Queen Elizabeth Engineering Prize Foundation, said the winners “represent the best in engineering”, adding that their achievements “demonstrate how engineering can sustain our planet and transform the way we live and learn”.
Additional reporting by Philippa Wayne
