Fei-Fei Li and the binders full of ladies in AI | The AI Beat

I thought of Fei-Fei Li this weekend. Fei-Fei Li, the pc science researcher recognized for creating ImageNet, the picture dataset that enabled the speedy AI advances in pc imaginative and prescient that led to AlexNet, the convolutional neural community that fired up the deep studying “revolution” that started in 2012. Fei-Fei Li, professor of pc science at Stanford College for practically 15 years and co-director of the Stanford College Human-Centered AI Institute. Fei-Fei Li, the previous chief scientist of AI and ML at Google. Fei-Fei Li, writer of the recently-released The Worlds I See, who was interviewed about her ebook by prime publications together with the Economist, NPR, Fortune, MIT Expertise Evaluate and Wired.

That is the Fei-Fei Li who was mysteriously lacking from a checklist printed yesterday by the New York Instances referred to as “Who’s Who Behind the Daybreak of the Fashionable Synthetic Intelligence Motion.” Actually, there have been no girls in any respect on the checklist of twelve, which was comprised of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei, Microsoft co-founder Invoice Gates, DeepMind co-founder Demis Hassabis, AI researcher Geoffrey Hinton, enterprise capitalist Reid Hoffman, Tesla and X chief Elon Musk, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Google co-founder Larry Web page, enterprise capitalist Peter Thiel, “web thinker” Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

I imagined thousands and thousands of eye rolls occurring directly

I imagined thousands and thousands of eye rolls occurring directly throughout the nation and around the globe upon studying this checklist, which was described by the Instances as “a bunch of researchers, tech executives and enterprise capitalists” who “had labored for greater than a decade to gasoline AI” earlier than chatbots “exploded in recognition.”

However for Fei-Fei Li and the hundreds of different girls who’ve performed a task within the “fashionable synthetic intelligence motion,” I additionally think about what occurred earlier than the attention roll. Earlier than the eyes gazed upward, possible accompanied by a sluggish head-shake of displeasure, I’m sure there was a slight furrowing of the eyebrows, a squinting of the eyes (maybe questioning if one had learn the checklist appropriately) — and maybe a protracted, drawn-out sigh, a shoulder droop, and a rubbing of the temples.

That’s positively the way it was for me once I learn the checklist, although I added a nostril flare and a curled lip. Li, for her half, gave little away about any behind-the-scenes eye rolls or different gestures. She merely shared an X submit by journalist Kara Swisher through which she echoed Swisher’s tackle having “binders” crammed with girls in AI:

Fei-Fei Li’s erasure is only a evident symptom of a bigger drawback

Leaving off Li from what’s, finally, a quite foolish checklist that provides zero historic context is absolutely only a evident symptom of a bigger “the place’s the ladies” drawback that each lady in AI (and most of the people, in all probability) is weary of addressing. Aren’t all of us uninterested in it?

As a feminine journalist protecting AI, I definitely am. I would like to by no means handle it once more. I’d quite write concerning the governance issues associated to OpenAI’s nonprofit board, for instance, as a substitute of the very fact that OpenAI eradicated the one feminine board members and that “white males ‘Bret, Larry and Adam’ will work onerous to construct a various board.” I’d desire to average convention panels that focus squarely on critical and fascinating AI points with out being embarrassed by the truth that the one feminine panelists in the complete convention are on my panel (as occurred not too long ago), or discomfort by the bizarre optics of my panel (with 4 trade representatives) having no girls in any respect (as additionally occurred not too long ago).

Dudes — bros — guys — come on. You — we — should do higher. There are many gender-biased points surrounding AI which are advanced to unravel. Together with Fei-Fei Li and different girls AI pioneers in a Who’s Who checklist is just not.