THE WORLDS I SEE

A leading AI scientist looks back at her decades of research and its personal impact.

Li’s path to the “epicenter” of artificial intelligence began with an insatiable curiosity and stoic defiance inherited from her parents, who came of age during China’s Cultural Revolution. Moving to the U.S. with her family in 1992, when she was 15, the author was drawn into the digital revolution, especially the false starts and stalled progress of AI—a discipline that, Li clarifies, goes back further than today’s headlines suggest. With the support and encouragement of mentors and collaborators, she attended Princeton, participated in breakthrough work at Caltech, and built a dazzling, boundary-crossing career merging physics with neuroscience and human evolution. Ultimately, she became the chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud and director of Stanford’s storied AI Lab. Li attempts to translate the scientific details of some of her work, but many of these sections are murky and tedious for readers without a tech background. The author is strongest in her broader observations about the primacy of human sensory interpretation and the rise in the importance of data for AI, or the similarities between the immigrant experience and scientific discovery. The author chronicles how she helped shepherd AI from its most recent “winter,” as well as the opening of the floodgates between academia and the tech firms of Silicon Valley. Li’s personal and professional experience position her to illuminate the looming challenges in this accelerating trajectory, along with its ethical tensions and inherent tendency to promulgate a privileged perspective. Unfortunately, she short-circuits the power of her insights and calls for a human-centered approach to AI by relying on technical detail, professional jargon, and personal anecdotes, conveyed with a distance that muffles their impact.

Li is a pioneer, but she misses an opportunity to meaningfully weigh in on a pressing current issue.