Artificial intelligence has a diversity problem. Too many of the people creating it share a similar background. To renowned researcher Fei-Fei Li, this paucity of viewpoints constitutes a crisis: “As an educator, as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother, I’m increasingly worried,” she says. “AI is about to make the biggest changes to humanity, and we’re missing a whole generation of diverse technologists and leaders.” From the chair next to her, Melinda Gates affirms this, adding, “If we don’t get women and people of color at the table — real technologists doing the real work — we will bias systems. Trying to reverse that a decade or two from now will be so much more difficult, if not close to impossible.”
Both women are powerful technologists. As chief scientist of artificial intelligence and machine learning for Google Cloud, Li is currently on sabbatical from Stanford, where she directs the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. Gates studied artificial intelligence in the early days of the 1980s when when she was learning to code at Duke University. She spent a decade at Microsoft before leaving and later pursuing philanthropy. Now Gates is putting her mind and her money behind a national nonprofit that Li is helping launch: AI4All.
The name says it all. AI4All will support educational programs designed to expose underrepresented high school students to artificial intelligence. I sat down with Gates and Li last week at Stanford University to talk about how to make AI research more appealing to women, why hoodies shouldn’t be tech’s status symbol, and what it takes to work in AI.
Jessi Hempel: How did you get to know each other?
Melinda Gates: If you’re at all interested in artificial intelligence, you’re going to hear about Fei-Fei’s work. I wanted to meet her and understand what she was doing, in particular, with some of her PhD students, and what it was like for a group of females to be in the field of AI. We met. Then Fei-Fei pulled together a group of women [studying AI].
Fei-Fei Li: Melinda, when I heard that you were starting to pay attention to AI, I really had that moment of thinking, “Finally. Finally, a world leader whose voice can be heard is a woman technologist and she is now paying attention to AI!”
I have been in this space for many, many, many years as an educator as well as a technologist, and I’ve been having this increasing worry. As a technologist, I see how AI and the fourth industrial revolution will impact every aspect of people’s lives. If you look at what AI is doing at amazing tech companies like Microsoft, Google, and other companies, it’s increasingly exciting.
But in the meantime, as an educator, as a woman, as a woman of color, as a mother, I’m increasingly worried. AI is about to make the biggest changes to humanity and we’re missing a whole generation of diverse technologists and leaders. So when I heard Melinda was paying attention to this, and your people reached out to me…you don’t know this, Melinda, but they reached out to me when my daughter was about four months old and I was home nursing.
Melinda Gates: So been there.
Fei-Fei Li: I was just so happy. We immediately arranged your visit and wanted to have a candid conversation. And I told the students, “You guys are all extremely passionate technologists, but you are also still blazing the trail. Be candid with Melinda about your experiences.”
Melinda Gates: And that was fantastic. I just want to echo one thing that Fei-Fei said: If we don’t get women and people of color at the table — real technologists doing the real work — we will bias systems. Trying to reverse that a decade or two from now will be so much more difficult, if not close to impossible. This is the time to get women and diverse voices in so that we build it properly, right? And it can be great. It’s going to be ubiquitous. It’s going to be awesome. But we have to have people at the table.
Fei-Fei Li: Exactly, because AI is a technology that gets so close to everything we care about. It’s going to carry the values that matter to our lives, be it the ethics, the bias, the justice, or the access. If we don’t have the representative technologists of humanity sitting at the table, the technology is inevitably not going to represent all of us.
Jessi Hempel: We have already seen some of the consequences of not including diverse voices in the beginning stages of development. Is it already too late?
Melinda Gates: I wouldn’t say it’s too late but I would say that that car is speeding down the road very quickly. This is one of the reasons Fei-Fei and I are so interested in thinking about how you get female technologists into this field.
Jessi Hempel: What came of your conversations?
Fei-Fei Li: When I was coming out of maternity leave, I was thinking deeply about what I could do to really help this generation. I see this as one of the most important efforts I can make. Three years ago, I had started a test program along with my former PhD student, Olga Russakovsky. It was a pilot program called SAILORS, Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab Outreach Summer Program. We invited high school ninth graders in the Bay Area. It’s a non-residential program focusing on young women, and inviting them to spend two weeks within the AI lab.
There are two pieces of SAILORS. One: We have a strong hypothesis that the pipeline issue is deeply affected by the way that technology is presented to young students. In Silicon Valley—I’ve lived here for 10 years. I love Silicon Valley, but there is a dominant voice of, “Tech is cool. Tech is geeky. Tech is a guy with a hoodie.”
Melinda Gates: Yes!
Fei-Fei Li: The guys with hoodies have changed our world. But they’re not the only technologists. That’s not the only way to motivate people, especially young women with many choices. [They’re thinking], “I can be a doctor at the bedside saving people’s lives. I can be a journalist in the most needed area of the world giving the people a voice. Why should I be in AI or CS if all I heard is you can have a hoodie and look cool?”
We add a humanistic mission into the teaching of the technology that goes to the core of what these young people are longing for. So for example, as a research project, we’re doing self-running cars in the robotics team for SAILORS. We wrapped it in the context of aging society, because a self-driving car, of course, is cool technology, but one of the populations it’s going to help the most is our increasing aging society.
Jessi Hempel: How did you decide to target ninth graders?
Fei-Fei Li: We spent a lot of time looking at past data. We realized that around early high school years is when students start to think about their college major. They’re questioning: Who am I; what impact can I make on the world?
The program was very popular and successful. We have amazing young women. The only problem is, it’s not big enough. So then I started thinking, we really ought to start to spread it nationally. And this is when we started collaborating with Melinda. We started this organization called AI4All. It’s still, I would say, stealth-ish.
Melinda and Jensen Huang, the founder of NVIDIA, are putting in the seed money for us. AI4All is focusing on spreading a SAILORS model—the education of AI with humanistic mission to diverse students—to different campuses and companies.
Jessi Hempel: Have you started rolling it out?
Fei-Fei Li: We officially started in March. Five universities are partnering with us: Berkeley, Carnegie Mellon University, Princeton, Boston University, and Simon Fraser. They’re going to start their own chapters of SAILORS. They will tailor it to different local communities. For example, Berkeley will be more robotics focused, and will focus on low-income students. The Princeton program will be more about racial diversity, because New Jersey has a strong African-American community.
Jessi Hempel: What are the major barriers to launching something like this?
Fei-Fei Li: We have so few AI technical leaders who are diverse themselves. Also, they’re busy doing the things like building a startup or making money off publishing papers. This kind of education is longterm. Education is thankless for a long time.
Jessi Hempel: Melinda, what insight do you have from funding other organizations that could help AI4All be successful?
Melinda Gates: Fei-Fei is in the process of hiring an executive director, and she’s in a very fortunate situation. She’s got a couple of really strong candidates. But we’re talking about the skills you need in that executive director. Because sometimes, and [Bill and I] certainly made this mistake, both ourselves and with other organizations, you think you know what you want. You have this really shiny candidate, and they have all these other skills. But if they’re actually not good at hiring, recruiting, retention, and building an organization, you’re not going to succeed.
Jessi Hempel: Melinda, when we spoke last fall, you put out a call out to figure out where to focus your resources as you turned your attention to helping women succeed in tech. Is this the first piece of that effort? Are we going to see more of it?
Melinda Gates: This is one piece of it. You’ll see more of it. Definitely. Since you and I talked, we’re funding Girls Who Code more, because I think that’s another model, for sure, for getting the pipeline filled.
But I’m also looking at workplace diversity. I’ll make some investments there. There’s a fantastic economist at Harvard, Iris Bohnet. She does behavioral economics and she’s looking at how you design diversity into a system. She’s the person who has talked about how in orchestras, women couldn’t get a first chair. Finally, when [audition judges] put a curtain down so that people on the other side of the curtain couldn’t see who was playing the violin on the other side, the numbers went up a little bit. But they didn’t go up as much as she thought they might. She realized that the person on the other side of the curtain interviewing could hear the footsteps of the person walking across the stage. Once they fixed that, the number of female first chairs went up significantly.
So in coding, when a professor looks at a female’s code or a male’s code, we’ve seen the bias numbers. You just have an inherent bias. When it’s anonymized, guess what? The women do just as well as the men. I know a young man who’s working on a fantastic young startup where you submit your code with no name. There are seven great coders reviewing the code on the other side that was submitted anonymously.
And the last thing I’ll just say, the other place that I’m investing is NCWIT [National Center for Women and Information Technology]. They’re doing a great job of designing things into that first computer science course a student takes that attract women.
Jessi Hempel: There are already many women and people of color working in the field. How do we draw attention to their work?
Fei-Fei Li: Oh boy. I just tell media, please find a list of AI technologists and give them a voice, because it’s so convenient to pick up the phone and call that guy that is always out there. There are women and other diverse technologists. And if you need help finding them, there are people like me. I’m happy to supply you with a list of AI technologists who have diverse backgrounds. I think that voice needs to be heard.
Melinda Gates: And the other thing I would just say for readers is that this is an exciting field. AI is going to change so much. So we shouldn’t be afraid of it. We have to be smart about how it’s done. But you can learn AI. And you can learn how to be part of the industry. Go find somebody who can explain things to you. If you’re at all interested, lean in and find somebody who can teach you.
Jessi Hempel: I’m so glad you said that, because I think sometimes we think, well, you’ve got to get the ninth grader interested because it’s too late for the rest of us who are mid-career.
Melinda Gates: And I think sometimes when you hear a big technologist talking about AI, you think, “Oh, only he could do it.” No. Everybody can be part of it.
Fei-Fei Li: Our culture has a tendency to call a few of them geniuses. And then mortals just think, “We’re not geniuses.” It’s not true. If someone has a fantastic biology background, he or she can contribute in AI and health care. AI has many aspects. AI is everywhere. It’s not that big, scary thing in the future. AI is here with us.
