Fei-Fei Li, ‘Godmother of AI,’ wins 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize for Engineering

Professor Fei-Fei Li, one of the seven pioneers of artificial intelligence and famously known as the godmother of AI, is set to receive the top engineering prize from King Charles.

Prof Li will receive the 2025 Queen Elizabeth Prize of Engineering along with six other pioneers, including “godparents of AI” during a ceremony at St James’s Palace today (Wednesday).

Other recipients include Meta's Chief AI Scientist Dr Yann LeCun, Prof Yoshua Bengio, Dr Bill Dally, Prof John Hopfield, Dr Geoffrey Hinton and Nvidia founder Jensen Huang.

Prof Li, a Chinese-born immigrant in America, worked her way to the top in the computer science field. She is the co-director of Stanford Computer Science Department.

She is recognized for her work on ImageNet, a project that has been instrumental in advancing computer vision and deep learning research. A major chunk of AI technology is built on large-scale image generation datasets that Prof Li and her students created.

In an interview with BBC, Prof Li said that she was initially reluctant to be recognised as “godmother of AI”.

She said, “I thought, if I reject this, it would miss an opportunity for women scientists and technologists to be recognised this way.”

The Queen Elizabeth Prize of Engineering is given to engineers for their innovations that benefit humanity across the globe.