AMD just paid $8.2 billion for the researcher who accidentally made Nvidia the most valuable company on Earth. Back in 2007, Fei-Fei Li was a junior professor with an idea her mentors warned would end her career. She wanted to label millions of internet photos so machines could learn to see. Funding agencies passed. Senior colleagues told her the field advanced on algorithms and that data collection was grunt work beneath a Princeton PhD. She built it anyway. Roughly 49,000 workers across 167…