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Huberman Lab · 4 min · Aug 10, 2026

AI can mimic motivation settings without experiencing feelings

Fei-Fei Li distinguishes adjustable AI objectives from human motivation, fear and love, which current systems do not experience. That distinction matters when chatbots imitate empathy.

Fei-Fei Li

Fei-Fei Li is a professor of computer science at Stanford and AI pioneer.

Co-founded World Labs, whose Marble product generates persistent, high-fidelity 3D worlds from images, video or text.

About this segment

Fei-Fei Li distinguishes adjustable AI objectives from human motivation, fear and love, which current systems do not experience. That distinction matters when chatbots imitate empathy.

From “Using AI to Increase Your Intelligence & Enrich Humanity | Dr. Fei-Fei Li”, Aug 10, 2026. Watch the full episode

“They don't have that data. They don't have that mathematical objective function.”
Dr. Fei-Fei Liat 1:17:56 · Huberman Lab1:17:56

Takeaways

  1. A fast or deep mode changes an algorithm's objective, not its feelings.
  2. Current AI lacks the data and objectives behind human emotional states.
  3. A chatbot's sympathetic phrasing is learned pattern, not felt empathy.

In this episode

Full episode
  1. 9:43ImageNet helped trigger the modern AI breakthrough7:57
  2. 1:04:34Surgical robots help, but rare procedures lack training data3:06
  3. 1:50:07World Labs is building AI for spatial intelligence4:09
  4. 37:05AI can remix recorded ideas but not private experience7:40

  5. 1:15:35AI can mimic motivation settings without experiencing feelings3:43

  6. 1:24:21AI oversight needs professional norms and multiple stakeholders3:12Up next
  7. 1:29:38Students need AI access without losing the effort of learning5:29
  8. 1:37:55Care robots could ease elder care and hospital workloads2:54

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

  1. 1:15:40

    hard to imagine machines could recapitulate, but perhaps they can. Like motivation. Do machines, do robots get motivated? We have rules of motivation. Like when I'm really motivated to do something, we call that urgency, a state of urgency. And I might move faster to do it, less activation energy. You say, let's go, I stand up a little bit faster. Machines could go quicker in a certain direction. But can you say, hey, I want you to seek this out, but with a heightened level of urgency? Or are they just constrained by the mathematical rules they can work with? So you could build this in the mathematics. So certain things, whether you call it motivation or in machine learning world, we call them objective functions, you can build certain things into math. For example, now you go to, say, ChatGPT, it has different mode,

  2. 1:16:31

    like think deeper mode or like give me a quick answer mode. If you don't know how this works, you're like, oh, this is interesting. One has more urgency that gives me a quicker answer. The other one has to go deeper into the search, right, and take longer to give me the answer. So as a human, if you anthropomorphize it too much, you might call it urgency or motivation, but the truth is this is just a different kind of objective for the algorithm.

  3. 1:17:08

    them. You can say, well, the one that thinks quicker has a time limit or token limit. The one that thinks slower can activate a different part of the model that would take longer. So it become actually mathematically very dry and not that deep. But for a human, you can call that motivation or urgency. But let's go deeper. because you are asking something deeper than that, right, is that there are cognitive states that humans, you truly just, whether it's motivation or urgency or fear or love, that is very hard to access and express.

  4. 1:17:51

    And do machines have it? Today, no. Let's make it very clear. We tend to imagine that the machines feel or they're not. They don't have that data. They don't have that mathematical objective function. So they can say when the machine says, I'm sorry you're so sick today, it's very different from how your friend says it to you. Because the machine said that because it has learned through pattern. When someone tells it, I'm sick, you should say, I'm sorry you're sick instead of, I'm so glad you're sick because that data exists. Whereas your friend who hears that, they generally want your well-being. They love you. They don't want to see you suffer. They have that empathetic feel of, oh, wow, if you're in pain, I've experienced pain. So it's not mirror neuron, but it's at least a memory of what pain means. The machine doesn't have any of that.

  5. 1:18:51

    So we do need to make sure we differentiate that. So a lot of what drives human, what takes human, what triggers human, doesn't exist in today's machine. We operate fundamentally different from today's AI. And we have to recognize that, respect that. And this is where public communication is so important.