The Worlds I See

Fei-Fei Li grew up in Chengdu and moved to New Jersey as a teenager with almost no English. She went on to become one of the researchers who built the foundations of modern computer vision. The Worlds I See tells that story alongside the history of the technology she helped create. It holds up as both a memoir and a plain-language account of how artificial intelligence actually developed.

The book works for readers who want a real AI history, not a hype cycle summary. Li was in the room, or leading the room, for many of the field’s defining moments. She traces her path from studying the human visual system in graduate school to building ImageNet. That labeled dataset gave neural networks enough examples to work. Along the way she covers the shift from hand-built rules to learned patterns, and the arrival of graphics processing units that made large-scale training possible.

Li earned her PhD in computer science at Caltech. She now holds the Sequoia Professorship in computer science at Stanford, where she also co-directs the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI. Her research career sits at the center of the deep learning era, and her writing reflects that firsthand vantage point rather than secondhand reporting.

The book does not shy away from the tradeoffs. Li writes about the same visual recognition breakthroughs that improved medical imaging and accessibility tools, and also enabled surveillance uses she finds troubling. That balance gives the book more weight than a straightforward success story would.

Recommended for security, compliance, and IT practitioners who want the real history behind terms they use every day. It also works for anyone outside the field who wants an accessible entry point into how AI research actually happens. Non-technical readers will follow it easily. Technical readers will still learn something new about where the field’s core ideas came from.

Originally published in ISSA Journal’s "The Cyber Library" column, July-August 2025 issue, by Jay Carson, Semper Sec’s Cyber Librarian. Read more at issa.org.