(Bloomberg) -- Fei-Fei Li, an AI pioneer, says technologists like herself need to do a better job of communicating the benefits of artificial intelligence and warns that growing public opposition in the US could carry risks for the world.
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"The US is such an important country in terms of its impact to the world," Li told Bloomberg's Emily Chang in an interview on The Circuit. "If we are not showing a positive attitude and positive path toward AI, everybody loses."
The US, she added, should serve as a "role model" to demonstrate the "incredible economic value" from AI.
Over the past year, there has been a surge in local backlash to the data centers that power artificial intelligence services, with much of the pushback focusing on AI's impact on water and energy. Half of Americans are also more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, according to a survey from the Pew Research Center.
By contrast, many countries in Asia demonstrate a more positive attitude toward AI, according to Pew. Li chalks that up to a strong focus on the technology throughout early education in those regions.
"In addition to being a scientist, I'm also an educator and a scholar, so I take it sometimes upon myself thinking that we've done a bad job communicating with the public," she said.
Li's work paved the way for many of the current innovations in AI. She was part of the team behind the academic project ImageNet, a database of millions of images that helped lead to advances in the ways computers recognize objects in images.
She has since founded World Labs, a startup focusing on so-called world models, which are meant to navigate and make decisions about the three-dimensional world. Li's startup raised $1 billion in a February funding round.
Li believes that the technology her startup is developing will help with robotics, healthcare, education and other fields.
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