Upstart Chinese language AI firm DeepSeek’s founder began out as a low-key hedge fund entrepreneur

January 28, 2025

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Upstart Chinese language AI firm DeepSeek's founder began out as a low-key hedge fund entrepreneur

The 40-year-old founding father of China's DeepSeek, an AI startup that has startled markets with its capability to compete with business leaders like OpenAI, stored a low profile as he constructed up a hedge fund after which refined its quantitative fashions to department into synthetic intelligence.

Liang Wenfeng, who based DeepSeek in 2023, was born in southern China's Guangdong and studied in japanese China's Zhejiang province, house to e-commerce large Alibaba and different tech companies, in response to Chinese language media reviews.

The hedge fund he arrange in 2015, Excessive-Flyer Quantitative Funding Administration, developed fashions for computerized inventory buying and selling and commenced utilizing machine-learning strategies to refine these methods.

Like many Chinese language quantitative merchants, Excessive-Flyer was hit by losses when regulators cracked down on such buying and selling prior to now 12 months. Nevertheless, it reportedly manages $8 billion in property, ample assets for funding DeepSeek's AI analysis.

It additionally has ample computing energy for AI, since Excessive-Flyer had by 2022 amassed a cluster of 10,000 of California-based Nvidia's high-performance A100 graphics processor chips which might be used to construct and run AI programs, in response to a publish that summer season on Chinese language social media platform WeChat. The U.S. quickly after restricted gross sales of these chips to China.

"Factor is, we’re positive now that we wish to do that, can do that, and are able to doing this, so we're among the many best-suited candidates to sort out it at this second," Liang advised Waves, a tech media outlet, in 2023.

"At the moment, neither tech giants nor startups have an unassailable lead. With OpenAI paving the best way, everyone seems to be working with printed papers and open-source code," it quoted him as saying.

Liang mentioned he spends his days studying papers, writing code, and taking part in group discussions, like different researchers.

DeepSeek is exploring what intelligence means, he mentioned.

"Folks might imagine there's some hidden enterprise logic behind this, however it's primarily pushed by curiosity," Liang mentioned.

When DeepSeek was requested, "Who’s Liang Wenfeng?" its first reply was to call a distinct Chinese language entrepreneur with the identical identify, a minimum of as spelled in English letters.

When requested: "The place is Liang Wenfeng from and the place did he go to college?" it mentioned that as of October 2023, the newest information cutoff for DeepSeek's R1 AI mannequin, "there is no such thing as a publicly accessible details about Liang Wenfeng's background, together with his hometown or academic historical past."

"In case you are referring to the founding father of DeepSeek, particulars about his private life or tutorial background haven’t been disclosed publicly. For extra details about DeepSeek, you possibly can go to its official web site," it mentioned.

Liang's targeted method matches in along with his dedication to push AI studying ahead. After many years of counting on innovation from the West, he says China needs to be making its personal contributions.

"What we see is that Chinese language AI can't be within the place of following perpetually. We frequently say that there’s a hole of 1 or two years between Chinese language AI and america, however the true hole is the distinction between originality and imitation," he mentioned in one other Waves interview in November. "If this doesn't change, China will at all times be solely a follower—so some exploration is inescapable."

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