Melinda Gates and Fei-Fei Li Want to Liberate AI from "Guys With Hoodies"

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."