An immaterial side note: funny how obsessed she seems to be with her age. She said once that people in the audience could be half or even third of her age.
Given that she's 49, is it really typical that 16-year olds attend these fireside YC chats?
Also, there’s this weird thing in culture (is it US only?) that whenever an interviewer brings up (even implicitly) the guest’s age, the guest has to make some quip about it as if they’re offended or sensitive to it. So I wouldn’t interpret even a slightly defensive comment about age as an “obsession.”
Given her intellectual stature, Professor Li likely was one of the strongest minds in any room she found herself in and, for the first half of her life, also one of the youngest voices.
Now that she’s entering mid-life, she’s still one of the most powerful minds, but no longer one of the youngest.
It’s something middle-aged thinkers can’t help but notice.
For the rest of us, we can only be grateful to share space and time with such gifted thinkers.
Coincidentally, today is Professor Li’s birthday! [0] I hope I will be around to see many more 3rds of July.
[0] Maybe her coming birthday was on her mind, hence the frequency of her remarks about her relative age.
Fei-Fei Li is known for the creation of ImageNet, which is certainly transformative in the field of computer vision. But the crux of it is painstaking grunt work to create the vast labeled dataset. Fei-Fei Li is a leader who mobilized vast resources and people hours to create this vast dataset. Certainly worth a ton of acclaim. But to claim she's the most brilliant mind in an entire room is a stretch.
You reduce Professor Li’s massive intellect to her leading the ImageNet project. You also misrepresent my observation that “Professor Li likely was one of the strongest minds in any room she found herself in [....]”.
That’s intellectually dishonest.
Watch the video linked in the OP, listen to her assessments of the direction of artificial intelligence, the state and future of the computing industry, the ways one might make a strong impact as a scholarly researcher, etc.
To do so is to recognize Professor Li is not only one of the most brilliant minds in that particular room, but also one of the sharpest minds in the history of Silicon Valley.
Typical? Probably not, but hardly relevant to the truthiness of the claim.