She ran her parents’ dry cleaner at 18. Today, the ‘godmother of AI’ is advising world leaders and running a billion

Before Fei-Fei Li helped launch the modern era of artificial intelligence, she was running a dry cleaner in suburban New Jersey.

Li immigrated to the United States at 15, arriving with her parents in Parsippany, New Jersey, with little English or money. To get by, her parents worked cashier jobs and Li worked in Chinese restaurants. When her mother’s health declined just as Li entered college at Princeton, the family needed to find a way to “make some money to survive,” she told Bloomberg. So, they opened a dry-cleaning store.

Even as she navigated the manicured campus at Princeton, Li joked she was the “CEO” of her parents’ shop. As the only one who spoke English, she balanced physics problem sets with “all the business”: answering phones, managing inspections, talking to customers, and