‘Godmother of AI’ says degrees are less important in hiring than ‘how quickly can you superpower yourself’ with new tools

Fei-Fei Li, a Stanford professor and CEO of the AI startup World Labs, is known as the “Godmother of AI” for her work building a large-scale database of labeled images, which changed the way computers comprehend digital images and videos.

Li, also the founding co-director of Stanford’s Human-Centered AI Institute, said she values candidates’ experience and relationship with AI tools more than their educational background.

“When we interview a software engineer, I personally feel the degree they have matters less to us now,” Li said of the talent search process for her AI startup in an interview on The Tim Ferriss Show this week.

“Now, it’s more about what have you learned, what tools do you use, how quickly can you superpower yourself in using these tools — and a lot of these are AI tools,” she added. “What’s your mindset toward using these tools matter more to me.”

When discussing the broader impacts of AI on education and the labor market, Li said assessing qualified workers used to rely on which school job candidates graduated from and the degree they earned. But “that will be changing with AI being at the fingertip of so many people,” she said.

For her own talent acquisition, Li added that she wouldn’t hire software engineers who don’t “embrace AI collaborative software tools.” She explained this requirement is not because she believes AI software tools are perfect, but because she believes they show a person’s ability to grow with fast-moving technologies and them being able to use AI to their own benefit.

Li’s view of AI skills and their value proposition compared to college degrees echoes a similar sentiment from other leaders in the industry.

In October, Mark Zuckerberg, a Harvard dropout, said skills outweigh a flashy college degree when hiring for Meta—but he noted that entry-level roles at his company still require a bachelor’s.

Palantir CEO Alex Karp has even challenged the value of a college education by recently launching a four-year paid internship for young entrepreneurs not enrolled in college to instead learn by doing and to “skip the debt, skip the indoctrination.” 

As more tech leaders look for AI-fluent candidates, Li looks for candidates that can help realize her company’s mission.

World Labs aims to build AI that can process and replicate the three-dimensional world through spatial reasoning—a feat that would revolutionize the tech all over again. Li bootstrapped the startup into a more than $1 billion valuation after only four months, according to the Financial Times.

As she works towards the next AI breakthrough, Li said during the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in 2024 that AI could change the world, and that “everyone who cares” should have a place in the technological shift.

“It’s so important that people from all backgrounds feel they have a role,” Li said.