Google Cloud AI Head Fei-Fei Li Shifting To Advisory Role

Fei-Fei Li will step aside as head of Google Cloud's artificial intelligence group at the end of the year but will continue to serve as an adviser, Google said Tuesday.

Li, who has been on leave as a professor at Stanford University, has spent nearly two years as Google's chief scientist for AI and leader of the Google Cloud AI organization.

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She will be resuming her Stanford professorship. A Google spokesperson confirmed to CRN that the return to Stanford has been planned since the beginning.

Li will continue to advise Google Cloud on artificial intelligence and machine learning, wrote Diane Greene, CEO of Google Cloud Platform, in a blog post.

Li "has built a tremendous team and together they have innovated and done a remarkable job of accelerating the adoption of AI and ML by developers and Google Cloud customers," Greene wrote.

Li will be succeeded by Andrew Moore, who will be departing his position as dean of the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University.

Moore, who previously worked at Google from 2006 to 2014, will serve as an adviser to Google Cloud AI until taking the leadership role within Google Cloud AI at the end of 2018, Greene wrote.

Google Cloud Platform is "incredibly fortunate" to bring Moore aboard "as we define how we will expand bringing AI and ML technologies and solutions to developers and organizations all over the world," Greene wrote.

In July, Li presented to Google NEXT conference attendees a set of tools that automate building language and image capabilities without the advanced skills typically required for custom AI solutions.

"We know that many of you need more flexibility than our APIs were designed for, but aren't yet ready to make use of the advanced tools like Tensor Flow and Cloud ML engine," Li said during the presentation.

With the set of new services, "anyone can make machine learning work for them," Li said.

In late August, Apoorv Saxena, Google Cloud's head of product management for AI, departed for a position heading up AI efforts at investment bank J.P. Morgan Chase.