How Fei-Fei Li, the ‘godmother of AI,’ went from running family dry-cleaning shop to leading $1B startup

By Phong Ngo November 27, 2025 | 09:01 pm PT

China-born Fei-Fei Li, who immigrated to the U.S. at 15, once ran her family’s dry-cleaning shop before becoming a Stanford University professor and cofounder of US$1-billion AI startup World Labs.

"I came to America when I was 15 — [to] Parsippany, New Jersey. None of us spoke much English," Li said in an interview with Bloomberg while in London to receive the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering, alongside Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang and five others.

She said her parents initially worked as cashiers but later opened a dry-cleaning shop due to her mother’s poor health. "I joke that I was the CEO. I ran the dry cleaner shop for seven years, from [age] 18 to the middle of my graduate school."

While studying at Princeton University, Li continued to help run the family business. Later, during her Ph.D. studies at the California Institute of Technology, she managed the shop remotely, according to Business Insider.

The "godmother of AI" Fei-Fei Li and CEO of AI startup World Labs. Photo from Li's Instagram

Li credited the experience with teaching her resilience. "As a scientist, you have to be resilient because science is a non-linear journey," she said. "Nobody has all the solutions, you have to go through such a challenge to find an answer. And as an immigrant, you learn to be resilient."

At Princeton, Li developed an interest in physics and began asking "audacious questions" about machine intelligence. That curiosity led her to pursue a Ph.D. in electrical engineering at Caltech, where she created ImageNet, a dataset of 15 million labeled images across 22,000 categories organized using principles from human cognition. She later turned ImageNet into an annual competition that standardized testing for computer vision models, as reported by Fortune.

In 2012, a neural network trained on ImageNet marked a breakthrough moment for deep learning, inspiring AI pioneer Geoffrey Hinton to further develop neural networks. The achievement earned Li the nickname "godmother of AI."

Today, nearly two decades later, Li is a professor at Stanford and the cofounder and CEO of World Labs, an AI startup valued at just over $1 billion after four months, according to the Financial Times. The company focuses on developing "spatial intelligence," enabling AI to understand and interact with the physical world visually, much like humans.

Li said she feels a deep sense of accountability as one of the people who helped bring AI to the world.

"So everything I do has a consequence, and that’s a responsibility I shoulder.

"And I take that very seriously because, I keep telling people: In the age of AI, the agency should be within humans. The agency is not the machines’, it’s ours."