Finished The Worlds I See by Fei-Fei Li.
The Worlds I See immediately evoked Candace Chen’s narrative in Ling Ma’s Severance. The parallels of the first-generation immigrant arc are striking: a father who moves abroad ahead of the family to lay the groundwork, the subsequent reunion, financial hardship compounded by parental health crises, and an unassuming daughter who eventually claims her voice—one architecting modern AI, the other chronicling a vanishing metropolis.
It underscores how severe displacement, while agonizing in the short term, frequently acts as a catalyst for depth and reinvention when anchored by clear agency.
I approached the memoir seeking a more humanized account of the modern tech landscape through a woman’s gaze. The book delivered. Her advocacy for “Human-Centered AI” confirmed that behind the algorithmic breakthroughs lies a substantial cohort working to align technical progress with societal good.
While I haven’t tracked her trajectory since the book’s conclusion, the recent momentum surrounding her spatial intelligence startup, World Labs, makes this an opportunity to revisit the work of one of the 21st century’s most influential pioneers.