The 'Godmother of AI' Helped Spark Nvidia's AI Boom. Now She's Joining AMD.

Fei-Fei Li’s work helped make Nvidia’s (NVDA) chips the backbone of AI. Now she’s going to work for Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). The chipmaker is buying her startup, World Labs, in an $8.2 billion all-stock deal. Once it closes, Li will become AMD’s chief scientist and report directly to CEO Lisa Su. I think for AMD, getting Li may matter as much as the technology it's buying. She ran Stanford’s AI Lab and served as Google Cloud’s (GOOG) (GOOGL) chief AI scientist. So she understands both cutting-edge research and how large companies put AI to work. That mix is precisely what AMD needs as it tries to win more business from companies building AI at scale.

Her big breakthrough was ImageNet. Starting in 2007, Li and her team built a massive database of labeled images to teach computers to recognize what they see. She then turned it into an annual competition. In 2012, a neural network trained on ImageNet won the competition by a considerable margin, running on Nvidia graphics chips. That moment helped spark the deep learning boom, and it earned Li the nickname “Godmother of AI.”