Review by Booklist Review
In this timely memoir, Stanford University computer science professor Li, an AI scientist who is well known in both academic and tech circles, tells a story about stories. Patched together, these tales elucidate the twists and turns to one of this century's most coded narratives: AI's maturation in American society. Li's interdisciplinary perspective looks at the archives of computer and data science, her own family's immigration history, and how these two narratives coalesced into a cautiously optimistic vision of the American dream, just as Silicon Valley's AI explorations were magnified by ethical concerns, including those of surveillance. Encoded in all these stories is a sense of humanity--in all its messiness, failures, illnesses, and uncertainty--as Li continuously returns to her AI philosophy of prioritizing human needs. Li's humanistic approach to AI is also reflected in her memoir's accessible tone, which allows readers to easily grasp high-level scientific concepts. Readers looking for a portal into a science that is not often illuminated or connected back to the human experience may especially enjoy this memoir.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Stanford University computer scientist Li debuts with an affecting memoir about immigrating to the U.S. and her cutting-edge work creating the ImageNet database that has proved critical to training visual recognition in artificial intelligence. She recounts living in poverty after moving with her parents from China to New Jersey when she was a teen in the early 1990s, but she excelled in school and eventually earned a PhD in computer science from the California Institute of Technology. The years after her graduation were filled with challenges, including her mother's declining health and her long-distance marriage (her husband was a fellow professor employed in a different state), but professionally she made a name for herself studying artificial intelligence. She recalls her Stanford University lab's race against Google to create software capable of describing images and, during her tenure as chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud while on sabbatical from Stanford, navigating the controversy that roiled the company after it accepted a Department of Defense contract for developing AI-powered facial recognition technology. Li's insider perspective sheds light on how Silicon Valley is handling the ethical questions posed by AI, as when she remembers feeling "awkward" trying to reconcile her Google colleagues' "good intentions" with her worry that AI could lead to "digital authoritarianism," and her story of overcoming adversity inspires. This brings new dimension and humanity to discussions of AI. (Nov.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
A leading AI scientist looks back at her decades of research and its personal impact. Li's path to the "epicenter" of artificial intelligence began with an insatiable curiosity and stoic defiance inherited from her parents, who came of age during China's Cultural Revolution. Moving to the U.S. with her family in 1992, when she was 15, the author was drawn into the digital revolution, especially the false starts and stalled progress of AI--a discipline that, Li clarifies, goes back further than today's headlines suggest. With the support and encouragement of mentors and collaborators, she attended Princeton, participated in breakthrough work at Caltech, and built a dazzling, boundary-crossing career merging physics with neuroscience and human evolution. Ultimately, she became the chief scientist of AI at Google Cloud and director of Stanford's storied AI Lab. Li attempts to translate the scientific details of some of her work, but many of these sections are murky and tedious for readers without a tech background. The author is strongest in her broader observations about the primacy of human sensory interpretation and the rise in the importance of data for AI, or the similarities between the immigrant experience and scientific discovery. The author chronicles how she helped shepherd AI from its most recent "winter," as well as the opening of the floodgates between academia and the tech firms of Silicon Valley. Li's personal and professional experience position her to illuminate the looming challenges in this accelerating trajectory, along with its ethical tensions and inherent tendency to promulgate a privileged perspective. Unfortunately, she short-circuits the power of her insights and calls for a human-centered approach to AI by relying on technical detail, professional jargon, and personal anecdotes, conveyed with a distance that muffles their impact. Li is a pioneer, but she misses an opportunity to meaningfully weigh in on a pressing current issue. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
