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1. Exceptional, Educational, & Inspirational
   I loved this book. It is beautifully and insightfully written by an exceptional scientist and inspirational human being who captivated my attention from the very first sentence to the last. I bought it because I wanted to learn about Artificial Intelligence, and Dr. Li provided a fascinating window into the world of AI research and development. In addition to that, she reminded me of the importance of humanity and kindness in shaping our lives, technology, and our future.

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2. A very moving human story about a brilliant, restlessly curious mind
   I read many books about and by scientific innovators. For instance, I’ve read every serious biography of Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Galois, Darwin, Descartes, Benjamin Franklin, Gibbs, etc. I love this book. I am fascinated by this woman. No book written by or about a scientist has moved me the way Fei Fei Li’s book has. She frequently brought me to tears as I read about the fierce curiosity that drove her to pursue one important field of knowledge after another (degree in physics, graduate degree in EE, reading great literature, studying important works of are, etc.) until she found her passion. She’s focused on figuring out (a) how the human mind works and (b) can we create human-level or better artificial intelligence. Ms Li faced and overcame difficulties that would have wilted 99% of today’s American young people. And all with a grounded, upbeat attitude that redefines “refreshing.” If you’re interested in understanding how the rare true scientific mind arises from the most surprising backgrounds, read this book. If you love a grand adventure with cliffhanger after cliffhanger, read this book. If you love reading biographies of major scientific innovators as much as I do, read this book. If you want to be moved by the story of a young girl, an immigrant who could barely speak English when she arrived in Parsippany, NJ at age 15 or 16, and who has become on of the world’s leading AI researchers, read this book. If you want to develop a scientific laymen’s understanding of AI, read this book. If you want to be inspired to pursue your passion against all odds, read this book. Got it? Read this book.

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3. Mainly historical
   This book is largely autobiography, a history of the author’s interest in science and career in AI. It is personal (explaining her family’s journey as immigrants to the US, and her own journey finding her path in academia) while also intertwining episodes from the field of AI during its evolution over the past few decades. The book is chronological in both aspects. After reading a third, having only progressed into the late ’90s, I skipped to the last chapter to see if we would ever get to the present for some discussion about where we are at and the future possibilities and dangers of AI. As it turns out there is little in this book that is forward-looking, and surprisingly little mention of LLMs. I was hoping for a wise discussion of the current trends and possible futures (“worlds”) led by a giant in the field. But that’s not this book. It does seem like a good book by a brilliant and passionate explorer that I might come back to finish some day, but if you are hoping to find meaty speculation about future paths of AI, I’d look elsewhere.

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4. Her concerns about ethics, and the probable missed use of the technology.
   Well written, very clear explanation of the AI development and worrisome, specially her concerns about the good use of this new technology.

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5. Unbreakable perseverance
   In the book entitled The Worlds I see, the author Fei-Fei Li, PhD. gives a rare vista of her early childhood as a young girl growing up in an old China where boys were often preferred by the norm. She exemplified herself by excelling in everything she studied in elementary school. In high school, her father left the country for America while she hit a rough patch struggling to learn physics. That made her doubt her own ability to succeed in science. As she missed her father, she remembered the repair work that her father did around the house helped her realize everything he did was indeed related to physics. Then, suddenly everything became very clear in her mind and she quickly developed a profound interest in physics. When she and her ailing mother arrived in America, she was struggling with English after enrolling in an American high school in New Jersey. As she tried to get help from a math teacher in her class, she developed a strong relationship with him not only helped her excel academically but assisted her family financially when her parents were struggling to start a laundry business. The said math teacher continued to be the most influential person in her college life and beyond.In Princeton University, she continued to study physics as her favorite major until, with the encouragement from the high school math teacher, she participated as an assistant in a neuro research project at Stanford University one summer. That short engagement revealed her a clear path forthward to become a researcher in vision related endeavors. She then went to CalTech for her graduate studies because the advisor she met was also focusing on similar research interests in vision by enabling the computer to “see” things. During a meeting with her advisors at CalTech, she fixated on the number reported on a short paper that someone had successfully trained a neural network to recognize basic images with a small number of samples. Her advisor challenged her to scale up that number to many folds. After she became a professor at Princeton, she started a research project known as ImageNet as she was still fixated on that number that she saw at CalTech. The graduate student that was assigned to her was a top-notch problem solver. He single handedly automated the collection of images on the web. But the efforts still could take many years to finish because labeling those images required human interventions. As luck had it, she followed the advice from yet another graduate student to use crowdsourcing in order to scale up the image labeling efforts cheaply and efficiently within budget and she was able to complete the ImageNet within a year (similarly, recent crowdsourcing initiatives were pursued by BioBank to collect about 500,000 DNA samples from participants for studying genetic links to diseases and HappyWale to collect 100,000 photos of wales taken worldwide for training the tail recognition algorithm). Upon her completion of the ImageNet, other researchers piped her in the knowledge of WordNet that was built to automate natural language processing. That confluence of knowledge enabled her to begin her research on an image recognition project to describe what was seen in the picture in a short legible computer printed paragraph.Her success in ImageNet had led to a position at Stanford University where she got all the resources that she needed to scale up her research. But her ailing mother suffered a heart problem. After surgery, she was puzzled by her mother’s refusal to comply with any physical therapy requirements to get well and led to yet another unnecessary surgery. She kept talking to her mother to inquire about the real reason behind. Her patience paid off when her mother eventually confided to her that she felt losing the control of her own body when everybody was telling her to do this and that and she couldn’t take it any more. That revelation opened up yet a new frontier for her research in human centered AI to design a system that is humane to people.From her book, it made me realize that a PhD degree is not just a fancy scholastic degree to show off. It is a serious pursuit of knowledge. People could only do that with perseverance, uninterruptible attention, and insatiable desires to get down to the bottom of things rather than just scratching the surface. Additionally, her story demonstrated the financial sacrifice that she and her family had to make for her to stay in academics instead of taking a lucrative job in the financial world. Her mother was always steadfast in supporting her interest in working as a scientist even though the pay wasn’t high enough when she tried to find a way to boost the living standard in the family while both parents weren’t working due to her mother’s illness and her father’s lack of English skills to land a viable job to support the family.

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6. Great read and fascinating story

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7. What a journey the author took us on. So many lessons for us all here about having the courage and tenacity to stay your course. An interesting look at an immigrants path in America as well. Oh yes..now I understand a little about how AI came to be as well!

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8. A perfectly balanced book that reads like a narrated story, but captures the incredible work done in the field of AI, through one of the pioneers in the field.The human side of the story is what makes this a compelling read – while still being very clear and understandable on the technicalities of the AI field.

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9. I’m with the other positive reviewers on this one. Fei-Fei Li’s autobiography is something special.I would like to point out one thing that I continuously thought while reading the book. It’s not every day you read a book by someone so accomplished who doesn’t make it all about them.Li talks about the people who’ve helped her along the way and the teams she’s worked with. It’s clear she’s good at bringing folks together and pointing them in the right direction, but she doesn’t brag about it.The book isn’t just about her, it’s about progress in science and the importance of teamwork. It’s not just about one person’s achievements, but about how we all move forward together – in personal and in professional life.In short, Li’s book is a refreshing read that puts the spotlight on the people behind the scenes and the power of teamwork. It’s a nice reminder that success is a group effort.

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10. Thé book quality is very concerning from Amazon And customer service refused to help. I even doubt whether they source book from a authorised Chanel.Content: vivid biography of a AI scientist from a first generation immigrant perspective

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