Godmother of AI: The Missing Piece of Intelligence LLMs Can't See | Fei-Fei Li

You know what I think will help this conversation because when I'm thinking about my kids' education, I want to imagine a workplace where they're going to be. So when I was growing up, the workplace says, "Big company, you're doing this," and so in order to get there, you need to study this and that. Can you paint me a picture of a workplace or a company in 10 years? What does it look like? What should be people be preparing for? Agency. I think I will give people more agency. So a lot of the, a lot of the future of work, I think will rely on people who knows, who know how to use these tools in a very effective way. So let me give you a concrete example. We, one of the very coveted jobs in Silicon Valley in the past 20 years as product manager. You know, there's a lot of conversations of the shifting nature of product management job. It used to be 10 years ago, fairly standard product manager's job is more the thread between users, markets, and engineers. They're more like conductors. They don't have to code. They, fairly often, they were not software engineers. So if they were a prototype, they go to a designer, they go to a software engineer, they get a prototype, and then they, they send a prototype to users and they listen to the users and synthesize the feedback. And that life cycle of product management might take typically months, you know, in a company. Today, if you look at the job of product manager, actually a lot of companies are experimenting with different things, but there are some fundamental changes. A lot of product managers just now codes themselves. They don't have to wait to prototype from a team of people. They can use AI to help to design something very simple and and vibe code. So that part shortest life cycle doesn't mean we, we, we should get rid of designers or software engineer, but it just saves time. And so that software engineer and designers can do much more sophisticated work. Also user side things are shifting AI can actually simulate user behaviors. And there are much, much more efficient ways to reach to the users to, to close the loop with users. So I'm looking at these young product managers, and when I look to hire them, I look for those who are writing the, the wave of changes. I don't look for those product managers who are still talking about the textbook workflow of even five years ago. So what I think the future of companies, there's a lot to imagine and depending on the company from healthcare to, to education to whatever industry. But I think our workforce will be much more empowered or can be much more empowered by powerful tools like AI. So that personal agency creativity. And also the boundaries of what people up person can do and cannot do is just a lot more blurred and lowered, lowered. So to me, that's kind of just fundamentally shift the structure of corporate America and every student today should try to imagine who they want to be in that new structure. I feel like you're describing entrepreneurs within workspace or you're like either you're on entrepreneur or you're an entrepreneur with an organization, which means you're handling multiple things and you're responsible for multiple things. I mean my hypothesis on this, you will get a barbell effect and this is what we are seeing at masterclass where you have one group that are becoming the specialists. And it used to be like I remember in school like I was told to pick one area and just go deep in that and that's how I build a long-term career. I think that's eroding except if you're in the top one, if you're like the actual best. What I mean by this is if I'm a copywriter, if I'm an okay one, anybody that now uses an LLM can do a decent job of that. But if you're the best in the world at it or if you're in the top one percent, I can't be you at it. And so we're seeing a) the rise of people or a specialist that are very good other thing. And I think that extends to tons of crafts. And then the other role we're seeing is this high agency generalist who's able to do lots of different things well and has good, has really good skills on the judgment side, on the agency side. And those people when you see them interact is really neat because they then interact with somebody who's in the top one percent at their craft. And they're like whoa I couldn't do that, right? And so my guess is that it's a bifurcation of those specialists and the people that can do lots of things well. That's interesting. I agree with you. I think both whether you're on the specialist side or generalist side, you both have agency. Yes, that's right. And you should both be able to use tools in ways that's uniquely creative and deep, right? I'm already seeing this, for example, designers, you know, they they bring so much human creativity, but I see some of them use all kinds of AI tools in ways I cannot personally imagine. So I know that's where their craftsmanship comes. And also the word entrepreneurial. In Silicon Valley, that's almost like I'm going to do a Delaware Incorporated startup. And that's the label entrepreneur. And I disagree. I think the word entrepreneur is very much a synonym to agency. You know, it doesn't matter. You can be a doctor, special specialty doctor. You can be a K-12 teacher. But agency is the key. And in the face of a technology that is so cognitively advanced, have be brave. Have your human agency and command that technology. Use that technology. Get familiar with that technology. Don't be afraid. Don't shy away from it because that's where the the wheels of history is turning towards the future. And I think everybody, it doesn't have to be a Silicon Valley founder. Everybody can be entrepreneurial for their craftsmanship or whatever they want to do. You mentioned so many tools like use tools, use just can you give me example of some of the tools that have been transformational to your job? Obviously all kinds of from chat GPT to Gemini to Claude. I use it in many different ways. They have so many features from helping me to study some deep topics or to have a conversation. Here's a fun example. I'm in charge of laundry in my household. So every weekend I have to do loads and loads of laundry. And it used to be my audiobook time, but sometimes sometimes I get bored just listening to audiobook and just about a few months ago I realized I can have a conversation of a deep topic with AI as I was just voting laundry. And that has been so much fun. Somehow it's more even more motivating for me to go vote laundry because I can have me time with with AI to learn anything I want. And of course software engineering has been completely transformed. And also the art and design side. I mean world labs we are creating models to help our creators and to imagine 3D worlds and all that. So we also see change in the creative world. Once again that's also a very contentious area because some companies have positioned AI creative tools as if it's a replacement. And I just deeply, deeply protest that positioning. I think that human creativity, even just on the visual side, the human creativity is so vast. But even just on the visual design side is profoundly intertwined with our emotional intelligence, with the story we bring, with the values we bring each creator's brain. I just think AI is such a powerful tool to help them solicit their express their creativity instead of to replace it. Do you feel AI can never be very smart until it figures out spatial intelligence? Yeah, so this is what work I'm doing now in world labs. So what is spatial intelligence? Spatial intelligence is a term that encompasses multiple abilities today that humans display in a in a environment like this one 3D environment. If we look at movement, week. call it 40 environment. We can understand what's going on. I see people, I see equipments, I see this beautiful home. This is the understanding part of spatial intelligence. We have reason. If I want to go and, you know, go grab a bottle of water in the fridge, I have to reason about the space, reason about I can go up the staircase. I can recognize the fridge. I reason about my movement. So that's reasoning. That's another part of spatial intelligence. A third part of spatial intelligence is generation. Is that in my mind, I, even though I'm not seeing your living room, but I actually have a view of what that living room looks like. If I'm a more better artist, I can actually generate a lot of visual 2D or 3D or 4D visual artifacts and pieces. So humans can generate a lot of space. And the fourth, last but not the least part of spatial intelligence is interactivity. Is how I focus on interacting with the space, right? Like how, again, laundry folding. That's my favorite. We can activity these days. That's deeply spatial. Now you fold each piece of garment and now you hinder them in the closet and all that is highly interactive. So spatial intelligence is these four things, understanding, reasoning, generation and interaction. And we are working on that. We have made tremendous progress. I'm saying collective we, you know, today you use, say, Anabana or if you use GPD image, that tool can actually help you to generate a lot of 2D imagery. It can actually explain to you what unknown flower is in your garden. That understanding is quite advanced. It can help you to reason. Now we can actually draw figures in AI tools. The generation part right now, the more mature products on the 2D side, what we're labs is doing is on the 3D side. 3D is so fundamental for robotic interaction for truly controllable creativity, such as design, architecture, game development, VFX. So that's the piece we are working on. Is it separate from LLMs? Like I mean, do LLMs have their limit and then world models step in? Yes, I know. I think they're complementary. You can think about humans, right? Just as you were saying to put a basketball in the hoop. First of all, that's such a fast action that people don't like sit there and think and talk in their head. But I do think that is a, even that act itself is a highly complex intelligent moment where a language reasoning come in because you probably as an athlete, you are, you are killing aware of the scoring this or missing this. What it means to the game or to the moment, as some of that is probably going on in a language way, but seeing the court, seeing the other players and aiming the ball, that is deeply spatial and then orient orienting your body, like knowing how to make that move is deeply physical. So, so many things we do in life is actually a mixture of language linguistics, intelligence, spatial intelligence and physical intelligence. So to me, they're very complementary. They work together. I do deeply believe spatial is a huge piece of it. Evolution took 500 million plus years to get spatial intelligence to maturity. It took much shorter time for language intelligence. So it's a very profound, ancient, fundamental, intelligent capability of animals and humans. And how far away from understanding the fullness of it, like 100 percent of? Wow. As a scientist, I never know what's 100 percent because science itself is pushing the boundaries of unknown. If the goalpost is human intelligence, the challenges, we don't even know how far human intelligence is, right? We never know the boundary of human intelligence. But if you think the daily capability of humans, the average capability, the cooking omelette, the laundry folding, the playing basketball, how far are we, we're not there yet. But is it going to take 100 years? I don't think so. My goal is we could get there in my lifetime. I think a lot of people are working on that. So that put a kind of a bound, right? I don't think it will take 100 years. It might not even take 50 years, but it's going to take one year either. What is your estimate? When does Dr. Fei-Fei Lee retire from laundry folding on Sundays? How many years? Yesterday. Like I said, I don't know. Lonely folding itself is also involves physical embodiment. So that also involves sensor technology and hardware technology. So that goes a little bit more complex. But again, I'm hoping it's our life's time. Yeah, me too. I said mom. I'm hoping. I mean, I know this is a term that you avoid for whole host of factors. But my hypothesis would be you can't get anywhere close to what AGI, which I know is the word that you avoid for host of reasons, is you can't even get close to it until we do the spatial intelligence. Because that's about, that's to read people. That's to interact in the world. Yeah. You know, look, I'm not going to find the popularity of this world. It's just as a scholar, we always the field in the academic world is called Artificial Intelligence. It's not scientifically rigorously clear what the G means. But whatever, that's just a word we can. It's just a nickname, I guess. Yeah, I agree with you, David. I think AI or intelligence is complex. I don't think the picture of AI will be complete without spatial intelligence. If you want to stay ahead in the AI era, follow Silicon Valley Girl podcast on your favorite platform, new episode every week on AI careers and how to not get left behind.