Monday Musings -- Worlds of Wonder

Often things in my world coalesce, combine, or collide in unexpected ways! I did not set out to find specific connections between a number of AI-related articles I've read over the past several weeks to the book being introduced here, also read this past month. Regardless, glad all these details came together in this manner! I just happened to be reading this book, and also reading articles that included information and insights from Dr. Fei-Fei Li, with whose work I was unfamiliar until these past weeks. It was serendipitous to be reading materials that didn't simply add yet another book to my "to read" stack. Her book, The Worlds I See: Curiosity, Exploration, And Discovery at the Dawn of AI, which was sitting on top of my "to read stack" for several months now, was a retirement gift from my boss from the US Space Force who was the first-ever Chief Human Resources Officer.

One month after Space Force became a reality if US Federal Law, she asked me to become her first-ever Deputy Chief Human Capital Officer, specifically help her build the first new military service in the US in 73 years. I didn't always love the challenge, made all the more difficult because during the first year, we were also dealing with the COVID-pandemic. But in reflection, as I've shared in my LinkedIn posts many times, I loved having been a small part of building the Space Force from the ground up. Nearly every person around us were exceptional peak performers. Despite being a small group, particularly in the first few months, the number of things we were able to anchor and achieve were quite remarkable. It was great to be a part of making history. Hat tip Ms. Patricia "Pat" Mulcahy for not only trusting me as your teammate and partner when we were building the Space Force, but also for sharing this book with me knowing I would enjoy it!

This is an amazing read and I saw parallels to many things we did in those early days of building a new organization, including how we were embracing technologies to move faster, more effectively, and with better outcomes, even when some around us didn't either see the worlds we saw, or needed more time to understand what we envisioned, and much of what that "first team" developed and delivered!

From this book's description on Amazon (for which I am not remunerated!): "From Dr. Fei-Fei Li, one of TIME's 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL in AI, comes "a powerful plea for keeping humanity at the centre of our latest technological transformation" (Financial Times).?Wired called Dr. Fei-Fei Li “one of a tiny group of scientists―a group perhaps small enough to fit around a kitchen table―who are responsible for AI’s recent remarkable advances.”?

Known to the world as the creator of ImageNet, a key catalyst of modern artificial intelligence, Dr. Li has spent more than two decades at the forefront of the field. But her career in science was improbable from the start. As immigrants, her family faced a difficult transition from China’s middle class to American poverty. And their lives were made all the harder as they struggled to care for her ailing mother, who was working tirelessly to help them all gain a foothold in their new land.?

Fei-Fei’s adolescent knack for physics endured, however, and positioned her to make a crucial contribution to the breakthrough we now call AI, placing her at the center of a global transformation. Over the last decades, her work has brought her face-to-face with the extraordinary possibilities―and the extraordinary dangers―of the technology she loves.?The Worlds I See is a story of science in the first person, documenting one of the century’s defining moments from the inside.

It provides a riveting story of a scientist at work and a thrillingly clear explanation of what artificial intelligence actually is―and how it came to be. Emotionally raw and intellectually uncompromising, this book is a testament not only to the passion required for even the most technical scholarship but also to the curiosity forever at its heart."

One additional thing that struck me while reading this book is something I'd been chasing down the last four and a half years of my Air Force career across the last three positions I held ... uncovering and unlocking data. Have often shared, including at an event I keynoted just this past Friday, that the key to making the most-informed strategic decisions not only relies on; it requires using data at scary-sized scale. Dr. Li presses on that being the most critical thing she came to understand when developing ImageNet. She had to use data at great and grand scale to make it really work effectively as a Deep Learning platform.

This book tells her life story to date, and shares in a very digestible way for those who are not science-backgrounded, what she has been advancing and achieving in the AI worlds she sees.