Transcription
Reading is one of my favorite all-time hobbies, which is why I was a bit sad that when I was a grad student, I really didn't read for fun. I was so busy reading papers and textbooks that I didn't really read for fun. And so, when I finished graduate school, I started this reading list page on my website to keep track of all the different books that I've read. And I thought that I would share my thoughts on one of the books that I've read with you today.
I have here next to me a stack of books related to AI that I haven't read completely. I haven't read every one of these books, but I've read most of them. And I thought that today would be a good day to tell you about one of the books that I thought resonated with me the most. And that book today is "The World's I" by Dr. Fei-Fei Li of Stanford University. She's also started a company known as World Labs. And this book I got because I had heard so much about Fei-Fei. I had heard that she was the Godmother of AI, but I really didn't know too much about her. And so I thought that this would be a great way to get to know her more as a person and hear her personal story. And it's a really riveting book. I don't want to spoil it because I think people should read it for themselves and experience it for themselves.
I actually read the physical book and listened to the audiobook simultaneously. So that's something that I've been trying where I try to read and listen at the same time. And for me personally, it augments the experience because I think just having those two senses working simultaneously somehow helps me retain the information better than if I was just doing one or the other. It's more than the sum of its parts, in my opinion.
So, this book was extremely captivating, and I just want to touch on a few points in it so I don't spoil the whole thing. The most riveting aspects of this book to me is really not so much the AI part of the book, but it's really her personal memoir. And I'm talking especially with the relationships she has in this book, specifically with her mother and her high school math teacher, Mr. Sabella. This is not to spoil too much, but her mother, we learn, has a heart condition. And multiple times in the book, does this health concern crop up. And Fei-Fei is at different points in her life. She's either in high school, or maybe she's in grad school, or maybe she's already an assistant professor. And it's this fear that she might lose her mother at any point due to this heart condition that kind of brings her back to thinking about her family and not so much thinking about AI.
And there are multiple points in the book where you have these really tender moments between her and her mother, where her mother is encouraging her to pursue her dreams of being a scientist and to not forgo that path in favor of doing something more lucrative. Because there are times where Fei-Fei is thinking, "Maybe I should just work for McKinsey," or maybe I should try and do another career that can pay more money to support my family. And so it's very, very touching. That relationship in the book, I think, is a very key highlight.
And also, another key highlight is the relationship she has with her math teacher, Mr. Sabella, in New Jersey. And you could tell that he has such a profound influence on Fei-Fei's development into a good student and eventually getting into Princeton University for college. Now, this part stuck out to me because I also had a math teacher that I wasn't quite as close as Fei-Fei was to Mr. Sabella. Like, I wasn't going over to this math teacher's house and having dinners with them and their family. This math teacher really pushed me to pursue a career that involved math and physics. And without her help, I am most certain that I would not have done physics as my major in college because I absolutely sucked at math before I started taking her math classes. My junior year of high school, there was a good chance I could have done something completely different with my life had I not had this math teacher, as well as the physics teacher I had in high school.
And so I think that will resonate with a lot of different people, especially in the sciences, because I think a lot of us scientists come from backgrounds where we often don't have someone in our family who is a scientist and really knows what that career path is like. And it's often a high school teacher who just happens to see something in us and say, "Hey, you're pretty good at this," or "Hey, you know, if you just change this up, you can become a really, really good math student." And then the rest is history. That's basically my story. I had a really good math and physics teacher and ended up pursuing a physics degree in college and ended up going to grad school in physics. So I think that part of the book also, her relationship, Fei-Fei's relationship with Mr. Sabella and his family, is also a really, really touching part because you can really see how Fei-Fei, when she was a younger student, had some doubts about adjusting to America and just coming from China at the age of 15. It was just a very chaotic time in her life. And I can really resonate with the feeling of connection with a teacher who sees something in you.
So, what about the AI aspect of this book? Well, I wouldn't say that you're going to learn artificial intelligence like an expert if you read this book because it is more of a historical retelling of different aspects of AI. The book kind of switches between Fei-Fei's life and different historical developments of AI and the parallels that she can draw between them. For example, she talks about Yann LeCun, who was at Bell Labs developing the convolutional neural network while she was still in Princeton, I think, or maybe she was still in high school at that time in New Jersey as well. And so it's interesting how she becomes the Godmother of AI. And there's a lot of discussion in this book about how she developed the ImageNet dataset that became pivotal for the breakthroughs in deep learning in the early 2010s. And so I think one also interesting aspect of this book is just hearing how her career developed from high school to college to grad school and then becoming a professor eventually, and just showing the different accomplishments and the highs and lows of what it is like to be a student in these really competitive institutions.
What I also find kind of cool is that Fei-Fei and I both studied physics in college. So while she was at Princeton, she was a physics major. She was really inspired by, you know, Albert Einstein, and she was really into physics as a younger person. And so she felt that physics had this awesome history of developments and breakthroughs and the ability to just write down equations and figure out mysteries of the universe that really appealed to her. But then, as she progressed in her education, she became really drawn to things in the brain and like neuroscience and AI. And therefore, she pivoted to doing artificial intelligence. And I think technically, her PhD degree is in electrical engineering, if I'm not mistaken. It's something in engineering. It's not like in computer science, I don't think. But nevertheless, her experiences in graduate school are also very eye-opening. And I think honestly gives a good sense of what it's like to be an academic and a very, very successful academic. It sounds like it's just a lot of work, which is, which from what I could tell when I was in grad school, is very true. Personally, when I read this, I actually get really happy that I did not continue on to be a professor at a university, just because it sounds like a ton of work.
Fei-Fei also has to navigate the two-body problem with her and her husband because her husband and her initially start teaching at different universities and are states apart from each other in the United States. And so reading all that makes me just think, wow, that just sounds incredibly hard. It also just makes her way more resilient and amazing for being able to accomplish all of this. And I really could just go on more and more about how awesome this book is, but I really think people should just read it for themselves. I hope I gave you some sense of why I really like it and how the book is structured.
Let me know if you want to watch more videos like this. For me, I really love talking about books. It's honestly one of my favorite things to do, and I'd like to integrate it more onto my channel if possible. So with that, that's all I have to say for "The World's I" by Fei-Fei Li. And, uh, yeah, leave a comment below if you liked it, and I will see you in the next video.