Fei-Fei Li says understanding how the world works is the next step for AI

By Fei-Fei Li, co-director of Stanford HAI and CEO of World Labs

Language is full of visual aphorisms. Seeing is believing. A picture is worth a thousand words. Out of sight, out of mind. The list goes on. This is because we humans draw so much meaning from our vision. But seeing was not always possible. Until about 540m years ago, all organisms lived below the surface of the water and none of them could see. Only with the emergence of trilobites could animals, for the first time, perceive the abundance of sunlight around them. What ensued was remarkable. Over the next 10m-15m years, the ability to see ushered in a period known as the Cambrian explosion, in which the ancestors of most modern animals appeared.