Fei-Fei Li and the binders full of women in AI | The AI Beat
Rephrased Title:
Fei-Fei Li and the Pioneering Women Shaping the Future of AI | The AI Beat
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I was thinking about Fei-Fei Li this weekend. She’s the computer science researcher known for creating ImageNet, the image dataset that sparked rapid AI advances in computer vision and led to AlexNet, the convolutional neural network that ignited the deep learning boom in 2012. Fei-Fei Li has been a professor of computer science at Stanford University for nearly 15 years and is the co-director of the Stanford University Human-Centered AI Institute. She was also the chief scientist of AI and ML at Google. Recently, she authored “The Worlds I See” and was interviewed about her book by major publications including the Economist, NPR, Fortune, MIT Technology Review, and Wired.
Yet, she was noticeably absent from a list published yesterday by the New York Times titled “Who’s Who Behind the Dawn of the Modern Artificial Intelligence Movement.” The list included OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, venture capitalist Reid Hoffman, Tesla and X leader Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google co-founder Larry Page, venture capitalist Peter Thiel, “internet philosopher” Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Not a single woman made the list of twelve.
I can imagine countless people around the world rolling their eyes upon reading this list, which the Times described as a group of researchers, tech executives, and venture capitalists who have been working for more than a decade to advance AI before chatbots gained popularity.
For Fei-Fei Li and the thousands of other women who have contributed to the modern artificial intelligence movement, this list was more than just disappointing. Before the eye rolls began, there was likely a furrowing of eyebrows, a squint of skepticism, and perhaps a long sigh, a shoulder slump, and a temple rub.
That was my reaction when I saw the list, though I added a nostril flare and a curled lip. Li, however, remained composed and simply shared a post by journalist Kara Swisher on X, echoing Swisher’s sentiment about having “binders” filled with women in AI.
Fei-Fei Li’s exclusion is just a glaring example of a larger problem. Leaving her out of what is essentially a superficial list that lacks historical context highlights the ongoing issue of women’s recognition in AI. As a female journalist covering AI, I’m tired of it. I’d rather focus on the governance issues at OpenAI or other substantial topics instead of pointing out gender discrepancies in panels or conferences, which I recently experienced firsthand.
Guys, we need to do better. There are many gender-biased issues in AI that are tough to resolve, but including pioneers like Fei-Fei Li in a Who’s Who list shouldn’t be one of them.