Meet Liang Wenfeng, the Chinese entrepreneur behind AI sensation DeepSeek
What's the story
Until recently, DeepSeek was a whisper among tech insiders. Now, it's the talk of the town, surpassing ChatGPT and Gemini in downloads and causing a $600 billion market cap plunge for NVIDIA. This meteoric rise has catapulted DeepSeek to the forefront of the AI revolution, leaving many curious about the mastermind behind this groundbreaking start-up. The sudden rise has put DeepSeek into the spotlight, but its founder, Liang Wenfeng, remains largely unknown. Who is this visionary behind the AI sensation?
Career transition
Wenfeng's journey from finance to AI
Wenfeng is a 40-year-old Chinese businessman with a finance background. He is the founder of DeepSeek. Wenfeng's foray into the realm of AI started after he co-founded High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund, in 2015. He used AI for trading strategies to forecast market trends and help with investment decisions. In 2021, Wenfeng began buying thousands of NVIDIA graphics processors for an AI side project before the US government limited exports of AI chips to China.
Project evolution
DeepSeek: A side project turned industry leader
Initially, Wenfeng's AI side project appeared as a quirky hobby with no clear goal. However, he stayed deeply involved with the company and its research to launch an open version of its reasoning model, DeepSeek-R1. He hopes to make DeepSeek a homegrown leader in AI by hiring top talent from Chinese universities and offering lucrative salaries. The recently launched DeepSeek app is an AI-enabled platform for natural language processing, data analysis, and other ML tasks.
Influence
DeepSeek's launch is AI industry's 'Sputnik moment'
The launch of DeepSeek has already shaken the US markets. The open-source AI model runs with fewer resources and compute power than its US counterparts, questioning the necessity of high-end chips like those manufactured by NVIDIA. It has also beaten OpenAI's reasoning model, o1, on some AI benchmarks. Silicon Valley venture capitalist Marc Andreessen compared DeepSeek's impact to the beginning of the space race in the late 1950s, calling it AI's "Sputnik moment."