Liang Wenfeng is the founder of DeepSeek, the Chinese Artificial Intelligence startup that launched DeepSeek-R1, an open-source inference model rivalling OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
Wenfeng, born to a primary teacher in 1985, was raised in a fifth-tier city in Guangdong. He has a Bachelor of Engineering in electronic information engineering and a Master of Engineering in information and communication engineering from Zhejiang University.
He co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2016, which quickly gained recognition for its innovative use of AI-driven trading strategies. By 2021, High-Flyer had fully integrated AI into its operations, using machine learning models to predict market trends and make data-driven investment decisions.
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In May 2023, Wenfeng founded DeepSeek with a focus on AI research in advancing the field of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). According to Wenfeng, DeepSeek was envisioned as a platform for long-term, fundamental research, where curiosity-driven exploration could drive meaningful advancements in AI, unlike traditional for-profit ventures.
He highlighted that basic research often yields low immediate returns on investment, yet he was captivated by the challenge of exploring complex fields like finance and the potential of artificial general intelligence (AGI).
Wenfeng focuses on understanding the essence of human intelligence and its underlying processes, believing that such exploration is crucial despite the lack of immediate commercial incentives.
He said, “We see that China’s AI cannot remain in a follower position forever. We often say there’s a one- or two-year gap between China and the U.S., but the real gap is between originality and imitation. If this doesn’t change, China will always be a follower. That’s why some exploration is inevitable.”
DeepSeek’s app soared to the top of the iPhone free app charts in China and the U.S., surpassing the once-dominant ChatGPT. The release of DeepSeek’s R1 model has ignited a heated debate in Silicon Valley about whether better-resourced U.S. AI companies, including Meta and OpenAI, can maintain their technological advantage.
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When asked why his AI was cheap, he said, “We reduced prices because, first, while exploring next-generation model structures, our costs decreased; second, we believe that both AI and API services should be affordable and accessible to everyone.”
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