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Huberman Lab · 3 min · Aug 10, 2026

AI oversight needs professional norms and multiple stakeholders

Fei-Fei Li says she returned to Stanford in 2018 to prepare for AI's social effects. She argues that professional standards, education, regulation and public participation should shape its use.

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 says she returned to Stanford in 2018 to prepare for AI's social effects. She argues that professional standards, education, regulation and public participation should shape its use.

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

Answers “Should AI be regulated?” See all 19 answers

“What I would not like to see is one person or a few people coming from industry and telling everybody what to do.”
Dr. Fei-Fei Liat 1:26:53 · Huberman Lab1:26:53

Takeaways

  1. AI needs professional norms as well as regulation.
  2. Computer science education should include ethics and social impact.
  3. Industry leaders should not decide AI's future alone.

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 stakeholders3:12

  7. 1:29:38Students need AI access without losing the effort of learning5:29Up next
  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. 1:24:25

    I mean, Andrew, this is why I returned from Google eight years ago back to Stanford and started the Human-Centered AI Institute. These are profound societal questions we had to face. And back in 2018, there was no chat GPT. But as an AI scientist, I knew that this is only going to accelerate. This is why I went to my colleagues and university leadership and say, let's put a framework. But it's not just my framework or Stanford's framework. The entire society in Every way you need to wake up to the social implication, as we have done this in human history, whether it was cars or airplanes or biotech, is that it's multidimensional with multistakeholders, right?

  2. 1:25:18

    There is the professional norm. For example, you guys as biologists don't sneak into the lab and try to put rabies into drosophilas or fruit flies, because that's a professional norm in your ethical training. There is industry rules, for example, IRBs. Every human subject experiment today on university campuses are subject to the IRB regulatory framework so that we can look at this. And then there are laws and regulatory laws, depending on if it's applied to humans versus crops. So AI has to go through the same. We need to have our professional norms. We need to have education. Computer scientists are not educated in ethics and societal studies. They're starting to. I mean, this is why a number of universities, including Stanford, are feverishly putting that part of curriculum into our education. Now, those are the norms in education, but we also should

  3. 1:26:31

    work with the government and different kinds of governments and society have different kinds of norms and traditions and heritage and look at where the regulatory measure should apply. AI, for example, crossing biology, FDA. I think that's a very important area to look at how AI should be used to help, but also guardrail to harm so that we can avoid harm. What I would not like to see is one person or a few people coming from industry and telling everybody what to do. I think that would be dangerous because market forces are different from societal norms and culture and heritage are different from education and ethics.

  4. 1:27:23

    And these are multi-stakeholder problems to solve together. I love that.