How we teach computers to understand pictures | Fei Fei Li

When a very young child looks at a picture, she can identify simple elements: "cat," "book," "chair." Now, computers are getting smart enough to do that too. What's next? In a thrilling talk, computer vision expert Fei-Fei Li describes the state of the art — including the database of 15 million photos her team built to "teach" a computer to understand pictures — and the key insights yet to come.

TEDTalks is a daily video podcast of the best talks and performances from the TED Conference, where the world's leading thinkers and doers give the talk of their lives in 18 minutes (or less). Look for talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more.

[NPJGlobal]

Who else came here after watching her 2024 TED Talk? Crazy how far we've come in just 9 years thanks to her and her team's research. I can't begin to imagine how much farther we'll have come when she gives her 2033 TED Talk ;)

[MeysamShojaeeNejad]

She is a real legend! After 6 years, we can see how she truly revolutionized computer vision and even AI.

[LuisManuelLealDias]

I really appreciate the presenter showed the failed results. It's honest, it's true, it's entertaining and everybody understands the bigger challenges better. Kudus, I was fearing she would only show all the best picks as a coy marketeer would.

[leocyclops]

Maybe one day a computer can watch this video and leave a comment.

[whattoeatryan]

She is one of the most influencial researcher in the area of AI. I would do anything for being her PhD student

[yzhang]

For those scientists or engineers whose mother tough is not English, while they are trying their best to improve in their profession, they have to spend time to polish their English. So far Feifei Li had done both pretty well. She's really brilliant!

[superlightningpandas]

I love this TED talk, I watched this like 10 times already. This sparks so much interest in me for computer science.

[nathangek]

This gave me goosebumps, I can't wait for what the future holds for us

[danielguo]

It's incredible.My graduated project is the image processing. It is hard enough to identified the item from a image.But they have made it so far..

[nisun]

This is a great contribution! We can see how much effort Li Fei Fei and her lab did!

[MrNouraiz]

so she basically used maximum time for a ted talk (18 mins), incredible, pioneer in image classification and mentor of karpathy;

[WBlake]

That last part about one day, for the first time ever, having another intelligence share the world with us brought me to tears.

[Uhrenknecht]

6:54 - "perhaps thousands of times more"
- so we took a teenagers smartphone.. ^^

[isurujn]

Man, this is amazing. Outstanding work! Props to her and everyone involved for their incredible efforts.

[umaribnali]

Give her a standing ovation you peasants! 😂

Those of us working with AI, be it Machine Learning, Data Science, Computer Vision or NLP know that her work is unprecedented.

[alvincay]

3 years old, but 300 million years of evolution.

[kariuki]

i hope one day i can take a picture of my exam questions and have the computer answer all the questions i don't know right there!

[jerrymuzsik]

This is emotional, I don't know what the future holds, but this entire thing feels so gravely serious and important

[sunnyd]

She is no doubt a brilliant scientist. What she and her team have done is absolutely wonderful. But in her presentation, she barely showed her excitement about her work or achievements. She said that she was thrilled, but she surely didn’t give me the impression of being thrilled. Maybe she is not as brilliant a presenter as a scientist. But that’s totally understandable. Her scientific work still inspires people.

[slashernunes]

I'm currently enrolled to a post degree in Data Science and I more specifically focused on Computer Vision. I'm watching her classes Standford made available on YouTube. For those insterested look for cs231n and have a great trip. Very inspiring talk! Thank you very much, Fei-Fei!