5/5 stars. my favorite nonfiction of the year.

this is the story of dr. fei-fei li's journey from growing up in an environment where teachers thought girls were less intellectually capable than boys, to finding a lifelong mentor, battling the struggles of being a poor immigrant family, to eventually becoming one of the key players in the rise of AI. this was a compelling read from start to finish, with just the right balance struck between technical, science, and personal tidbits. it goes along with dr. li's focus on the humanistic aspects of AI, and for someone like myself with little to no background in computing or science, it was just the right level of being understandable and educational at the same time.

i received an ARC of the audiobook edition in exchange for an an honest review.

Way, way overwritten. And I don’t just mean the panoply of unnecessary adverbs. The dialogue is heavy-handed. Scenes that could and arguably should take four lines to convey instead stretch for whole chapters. Three hours into the audiobook version of a story that’s ostensibly about artificial intelligence (see this book’s subtitle), we were still in the author’s parents’ dry cleaning shop discussing how the young Dr. Fei-Fei Li was great at fetching garments and greeting customers by name. Chapter five was mostly a long, dry history of evolutionary biology (which is fascinating when told well, but not here). There was nothing compelling driving this memoir forward. At all.

Talk about AI (artificial intelligence) and news about it is everywhere. One of the people involved in its research is the author of this book. Fei-Fei Li, in 2007, built ImageNet, a database of images which today contains millions of categorized images, becoming the impetus for machine learning.

Her junior year in high school was her second year as an immigrant in the United States. Her father, who had worked in the computing department of a chemical company, moved to the US three years earlier to start a new life for the family and now worked at a camera shop. When she and her mother eventually joined her father, she spoke very little English but studied ESL at the school library. Her early life was not easy, since her mother fell ill, and her father lost his job after some dispute at the camera shop. To escape the burden of her situation, she read translated books constantly; Dickens, Hemingway, anything she could get her hands on. You soon find that teachers, people she comes across, create the hope she needs and help make the impossible, possible for her. She never forgets the importance of allowing students in the classroom to be free to create; the importance of diversity in all aspects of living; and how those who work with AI now and in the future, can respect human dignity.

I must mention the book, “The Singularity Is Near”, by Ray Kurzweil, published in 2005. Quoting Bill Gates: “Ray Kurzweil is the best person I know at predicting the future of artificial intelligence. His intriguing new book envisions a future in which information technologies have advanced so far and fast that they enable humanity to transcend its biological limitations—transforming our lives in ways we can’t yet imagine.” Read both books.

Incredible. I loved her memoir spread throughout the book. I loved seeing the world through her eyes. The questioning, the figuring out, the testing. She’s a brilliant scientist, with incredibly strong parents.

The massive amount of work and brainstorming to catalogue millions of images, create algorithms for AI, is mind blowing, and ground breaking for sure.

I wasn’t sure how interested I would be in this book, as I’m not really into these subjects, but I’m glad I gave it a shot! I appreciated so much her story, and learning about the dawn of AI and the brilliant minds behind it.