How to be 'fearless' in the AI age, with Fei-Fei Li and Reid Hoffman

Transcript from https://podmenti.com/t/a83af988d66c9105

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Hey folks, this week on the show, we're sharing Reed Hoffman's conversation with Dr. Fei Fei Lee from our twenty twenty five Masters of Scale summit.
Feife is a brilliant computer scientist and author who's been at the forefront of AI development for decades.
She was a founding director of Stanford's human centered Аi інститут.
And is now the co founder and CEO of World Labs.
She joined Reed on stage for candid reflections on where we are and where we're headed as AI evolves.
I think you'll enjoy this.
I've lost count of the number of times we've done this and it's always awesome and an honor. So thank you for being here. Thank you. I I've lost count too.
Obviously anyone who's following your career knows that you're one of the OG.
in the wave of AI, Image Net.
All of these things that are
contributions that are fundamental.

So by the way, thank you for that.
And now you're working on spatial intelligence.
An world building.
Say a little bit about why you took a sabbatical from a job you love with human centered AI and Stanford C S and started building this company. And what you're doing.
Supporters, investors of OpenAI. So when OpenAI was funded, you and I talked about the dream of AGI, right? As a AI scientist,
I'm torn between the word AI versus AGI because they more or less mean the same thing for me. But language aside, what is I use AGI for the AI we haven't invented yet.
So what is AGI to me? A GI to me is the capability of intelligence of machines that
are on par with humans and in many cases can be superseding humans. And I think think about this as a door to the future and
On this door there are multiple keyholes. And language is one of them. One of the major ones because language is a essential part of uh intelligence, to the point that I know you're a quasi philosophy major.
That uh Wickenstein Quality is actually a uh a positive word. At Stanford, I have to say, because Reed is a alumni, there's a very special uh major called Symbolic Systems. They combine philosophy and cognitive science and computer science. By the way, I was the eighth person to declare that major.
Yeah.
quasi it just means the proportions. So it's a good word. I'm I'm digging myself out of a hole. Um Wittgenstein says that language defines the limit of world.
I'm actually disagreeing with that. Excellent.
Because I think language
Defines
A certain level of boundary
That the world can be described in symbolic forms.
But beyond that
The world is actually limitless.
And what is that world? How do we define that? What does that have to do with intelligence? How do we use machines to express that? I love that whole thing in the world modeling. World modeling is very connected to language, but it's about
Expressing, representing and eventually

of the state of the world
That could be virtual, it could be physical.
And what does world modeling entail? It does entail language, because language is one form of interrogation with the world, but it also entails
The visual.
The lights.
The semantics, the space, the physical actions, and all of that is still at the dong, and it's the next phase of AI.
And that's what world labs is about. We are trying to do world modeling and we're trying to bring that level of spatiance into the next chapter of AI. So two questions with the spatial intelligence. One, because there are a few people who will be deep here, but a lot of people, their primary experience of LLMs is like ChatGPT, Gemini, et cetera.
So what should they understand is different not just in the

Our world is not just language.
And then two, what does the road ahead look like? What are some of the challenges to overcome in getting there?
Yeah. What would it get us when we have world modeling? Well we're already seeing budding signs of that. Lots of storytellers are creatives with many medium.
Right, whether it's pixels, movies, sculptures, digital art, and that is a highly, highly creative, interactive.
world that you cannot just use language to express. And uh world modeling, the ability to generate things, to generate worlds that you can immerse yourself in, you can interact with is high
enticing and exciting for for creators. And that's one way you see world modeling could be applied for. This is not just for entertainment and storytelling. This could be for design, could be for even industrial uses, all the way to healthcare, medicine, education.
Also the distance between
Being passively entertained and being actively participating in experiences right now is been closing rapidly. And the ability to have machines to create world models that would allow that kind of immersive uh experiences is really powerful.
And that also segues into simulation. Simulation is really important both for human experiences, human learning, as well as for embodied AI. Robots needs to learn from simulation as much as it needs to learn from the real world.
We can really learn about the history of robots, including self-driving cars, and the critical roles that simulation has played. So the application really is boundless. What are the challenges? I'll just call out one challenge. Well, there are actually many challenges. One challenge is data. Unlike language,
Where
Data is all over the internet. When it comes to world modeling, data is not as uh obvious and easily obtainable compared to language. Of course, there are video data. That's one of the most critical form of data for world modeling, but the world
Like I said, is very multi model, it's very spatial, it has fundamental three D information, geometry, physics, dynamics, and some of those are not easily obtainable.
And so there's obviously been a lot of discussion around robotics.
And
One of the things I think we should draw the line for everyone is to understand how critical
World modelling will be

Robotic elevation of work and human conditions. So say a little bit about like why this cognitive set is so important there.
Yeah, I spent a lot of time thinking about that because uh frankly after you mentioned that after
The first wave of computer vision achieving a level of
Fidelity and quality, I actually went into a little bit of a crisis myself and start to soul search what is perception about, what is vision for. I thought it would take me a hundred years to work on the problem of uh
object recognition, but it went a little faster than I thought. So I needed another uh North Star. And uh it took me back to uh evolution and I started to read a lot about evolution and I'm like literally this much of a philosoph compared to read, is that
About five hundred thirty million years ago there was a incredible evolutionary event called Cambrian explosion, where the animal speciation just exploded, where it's also the beginning of the nervous system, the beginning of uh photosensitive uh cells.
And it really after reading a lot of literature and thinking, it really dawned on me
The goal evolutionary reason анима perception.
Is actually
For activity. For
Interactivity. It's active. And that means
Perception and the
Perceptual intelligence is the foundation of movement.
And the beginning of the movement is very simple.
translate your body somewhere. Quickly the movement becomes much more interactive and fighting for food to mating, to nesting, to rearing offsprings to much
deeper I mean look at mammals and humans our ability to move is very, very complex. The degree of freedom we have between our fingers, toes and body torso is very high.
And
All this requires a fundamental
Perceptual spatial intelligence of the world we're in so that we know we understand and we can plan.
for all the movements. So really truly my opinion that the level of nuanced complex spatial world understanding is the brain of

give a particular sense where you need that unbodied intelligence for them to all be embodied.
There will also, of course, be a little bit like your opening comment on Wittgenstein.
the question of actual cognitive reasoning capabilities that are not just purely linguistic.
Mm-hmm
Still ahead, more of Reed's conversation with Fay Fey about why we should all be more fearless.
In the age of AI.
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Welcome back to Masters of Scale.
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Part of what you get with spatial intelligence is other forms of intelligence that will even be important there. It isn't just in a pure
Perception action loop. The old Western perception as a camera and action as separate is clearly wrong. That was the thing that you were just referring to.
But it will also increase our cognitive capabilities, our like
How we
imagine the world, how we model it in our heads.
What are some of the reasoning characteristics you think might come out from when you add spatial, not just to robots, but to every AI system? That's wonderful, Reed. This is why I love talking to you. So
Throughout human civilization, if you look at the milestones of
humans building civilization. There's a lot of milestones that cannot possibly be achieved with just language. The nuance of uh
space and spatial reasoning, world modeling is very, very clear. For example, let's just take uh early days
The building of pyramid. The ability to start to abstract geometry, the sense of geometry and also the construction of large bodies.
There is a lot of things that goes on into that cognitive spatial reasoning that's
Not this
simplistic transactional
behavior of I see something, I want to move it.
Another example is the deduction of the structure of DNA.
If you know the history of how DNA was discovered, of course many scientists were getting a vibe using today's language that there's something
There's something that's going on in this
fundamental building block of our genetics.
But it took um Rosalind Franklin under appreciated scientists to take these X ray
Imagery.
But then Francis Crick and uh James Watson
Of course they were deeply thinking about this.
But to go from this imagery
To a three D double helix intertwine structure.
Is
Deeply spatial.
You cannot language your way into this deduction. I'm sure language participated. I'm not anti language, you know. I love biggest type. I am pro language. Exactly. Exactly. Um
But that is a beautiful example of humans using spatial reasoning and cognitive ability to do something or discover something we've never done. So I think that as we empower AI with this ability, this is not just for robots that can, you know.
pick up a glasses or or a cube. This is for
Lifting all of humanity's capability because we could collaborate with machines having this capability. Yeah. Awesome. And I actually have never heard the DNA answer from you before, so I love asking you questions that I have never asked you before.
There's a lot of discourse around is AI overhyped, underhyped? We're obviously here in the valley, so everyone in the valley more or less thinks underhyped.
People want to say, are we going to go through another AI winter?
What's your view about this discussion about what's going on with AI? What would you say, hey, this is the parts that are under hype, these are the parts that are maybe a little too soon.
What's the guide to the wise on
the current discourse and sorting wheat from chaff a little bit.
Oh boy, I have to be careful how I answer this question, but I totally appreciate this
AI is a civilizational technology. I'm not the only one saying this, but I truly believe because uh
Even if you're inspired by humans and evolution, this is

intellectualize and to think, to do, is fundamental to humans and a piece of technology that can do that is phenomenal. In my opinion, it's more or less not overhyped
as a intellectual future of t humanity because
AI is the new computing. If you look at today's world and just
Recognize
Where there are chips.
You know, because chips are the physical
Places where computing happens from a light bulb.
Ту а сел драйвінь кар, ту на айплей.
Everywhere there's ships.
Well
It's very obvious at this point, wherever there's chip.
There's compute.
Wherever there's compute
There will be AI if it's not there. So from that point of view, both from a business as well as use case point of view, AI is the future.
Obviously, when it comes to hype, I do think we have to be a bit nuanced. For example, it took more than twenty years.
To go from um
Sebastian Thrum's first self driving car that can drive a car a hundred thirty miles in the Nevada desert, which has no traffic, apparently. Um
Right. Well you might say, well,'cause part of it is software it was pre deep learning age and uh software uh development was slower. You're right. It's
Definitely deep learning accelerated the brains of self-driving car. But let's also not forget that car industry, the entire supply chain as well as customer use bases, has been established for more than a hundred years. And it's a very, very mature business model and
very mature infrastructure and manufacturing and everything. So if it took twenty years to get
Just cars, which is the simplest form of robot.
On the street. I knew he's gonna say that. Yeah, well roombas are mini cars.
Rumas actually
I think cars are
Uh you know, it's literally a square ish box that moves on 2D surface and the only thing you have to do is not to touch anything. Right, because if you touch you're scoot.
Rumbus does touch and m by and large it's okay. Um
But robots the the whole thing about robot is it's a three dimensional
Machine.
That the whole goal is to touch things.
And touch it in the right way. I mean, this is huge. So I think there's still gonna be a journey for robotics for sure.
So one of the things to realize this civilization technology
is to
Build trust.
And
whether it's for technologists, companies, et cetera, et cetera, what do you think the things we should be doing
З лідери з компанії з он.
To help build trust because it's obviously
We only start realizing
the real benefits once we get there. Great question. I know you and I both care about this.
One thing I feel very strongly is in the AI age.
Trust can not be outsourced to machines.
Trust is fundamentally human. It's at the individual level, community level, and societal level. And this is why Reed was part of our supporters for the Human Center AI Institute at Stepfer, we we established that
Twenty eighteen. So way before this latest wave of AI
blossoming is because we recognize that
As machines get more powerful in its computing and reasoning and eventually even actionable capabilities,
We ніto і stabliš a new norm.
that needs to be part of the fabric of the society where in within this norm
Humans continue to have the agency
To build trust.
with each other
With the newer tools.
like AI with more powerful product like
Chatbots and and other things.
And eventually
This trust has to be
renewed or updated into our governance model, not just the governance of community and companies, but governance of the society at large. So I do think trust is a very, very important element
for those audience is very entrepreneur heavy
I would just say care about this from the beginning, no matter what product or business you're doing.
Some of you might be healthcare, you know how important it is. Some of you might be just in the infrastructure, SaaS, whatever application that feels like maybe that's more removed. That's not true, because you're serving people, you're serving businesses. Trust is really important. Have that human agency.
А з сорс.
Yep, hundred percent.
Yes.
You know, part of the work that you know you and
Edge we're leading with the human centered AI, which came from your

Part of the thing that led me to focusing on agency is one of the things that elevation of human agency as one of the key things that we need to do.
So let's go to kind of the science.
Side of it.
You said it's important for scientists to be intellectually
Fearless.
So
What does that mean for how we should think about inventing the future? What does that mean for how science should progress?
in the terms of the next generation of innovators,
Where should fearlessness play into that?
Well, if scientists need to be fearless, I think entrepreneurs need to be more fearless. Um
Fearless to be I love this word, that this is part of
the way I actually do hiring is look for people, especially young people with that fearlessness.
Fearless is to be free.
To get rid of the shackles
that constrain your creativity
Your courage.
And your ability to just get shit done.
And pardon my language. It's uh it's actually it's a technical. It's actually our core culture of our company. So um
Is that
You know, humans are not exactly the most fastest, strongest, you know, animals on earth, right? We uh we we're if you look at many of the dimensions I was just in Africa this summer with my kids. I mean, there's so many animals that are just so much better than us.
But I I do feel that way. Lots. Yes.
But there's something
that
is in our brain in our mind, in our soul that can propel us to do incredible things for the world for
Arselfs for each other.
And a lot of that comes from our fundamental
Uniquness of our creativity
And our sense of community and all this. In order to unleash that, especially as
Technology is moving so fast.
To me the foundational emotional criteria is be creative, be free. And that translates into be fearless, run into uncertainties, run into
Bold ideas that no one has
make it happen yet. Run into contrarian hypothesis. Run into hard
Hard tasks. Um someone said I forgot who said that.
Tasks that are so uh certain
Versus tasks that are uncertain are sometimes equally hard.
Mm.
Choose the one that's more uncertain because your creativity will be working harder. And that's where
The magic happens, so I love the word fearless because
That's where boundaries are broken and creativities are unleashed and uh and magical things happen.
And
And with that you can see why we wanted to open the first fireside with Fay Fei. Let's give her a hand. Thank you.
Thank you.
Thanks to Doctor Fei Fei Lee for joining us at the Masters of Scale summit.
This conversation was recorded on stage at the Presidio Theatre in San Francisco.
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