DeepSeek Liang Wenfeng
At 40, Liang Wenfeng has emerged as a key figure in China’s growing artificial intelligence (AI) industry, leading DeepSeek. It is an AI startup that has disrupted markets and drawn comparisons to global players like OpenAI. A product which Liang Wenfeng describes as not a business model but something that is “driven out of curiosity”.
DeepSeek launched a free AI assistant last week that the firm says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of current services, triggering a global selloff in tech stocks.
Liang Wenfeng was born in Guangdong and educated in Zhejiang. Before founding DeepSeek in 2023, Liang Wenfeng launched High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management in 2015, a hedge fund that specialised in algorithmic trading.
High-Flyer was hit by losses when regulators cracked down on such trading in the past year. However, it reportedly manages $8 billion in assets – providing both the capital and infrastructure to fuel DeepSeek’s ambitions.
High-Flyer’s investments have also played a pivotal role. By 2022, the hedge fund had built a cluster of 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs—critical components for training and running advanced AI systems.
Liang Wenfeng describes DeepSeek as an exploration into what intelligence means, driven primarily by curiosity rather than immediate commercial goals. “People may think there’s some hidden business logic behind this, but it’s mainly driven by curiosity,” Liang said.
Liang Wenfeng said he spends his days reading papers, writing code, and participating in group discussions, like other researchers. Also Read | DeepSeek R-1, reasoning model of China’s AI startup is now available on Perplexity, to support deep web research
Liang’s focused approach fits in with his determination to push AI learning forward. After decades of relying on innovation from the West, he says China should be making its own contributions.
“What we see is that Chinese AI can’t be in the position of following forever. We often say that there is a gap of one or two years between Chinese AI and the United States, but the real gap is the difference between originality and imitation,” he said in another Waves interview in November. “If this doesn’t change, China will always be only a follower — so some exploration is inescapable.”