When 40-year-old Liang Wenfeng, founding father of the tech world’s newest AI star, DeepSeek, returned to his dwelling village within the southern Chinese language province of Guangdong for Lunar New 12 months’s Eve celebrations final week, he was given a hero’s welcome.
The village honored him with a pink banner that mentioned, “Heat congratulations for changing into the delight of his hometown,” based on a translated model of the banner.
Wenfeng’s reputation is partly because of his AI startup, DeepSeek, which rattled U.S. tech stocks when it skyrocketed to the top of app stores final month (it is nonetheless topping iPhone charts) after claiming that its newest AI mannequin matched or surpassed AI from business leaders like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google—however at a fraction of the fee.
Whereas AI from startups like Anthropic can cost $100 million to develop, DeepSeek claims its AI costs less than $6 million for a similar performance.
Liang Wenfeng. Photograph by VCG/VCG by way of Getty Pictures
Wenfeng was already well-liked in Guangdong earlier than DeepSeek. He turned a billionaire after establishing the hedge fund Excessive-Flyer in 2015, which exceeded 100 billion yuan (near $14 billion) in property beneath administration by 2021. He’s now price not less than $1 billion, based on Forbes.
Residents of his hometown told the Financial Times that as a toddler he was a “prime scholar” who learn comedian books and excelled in math.
“All of us grew up on this village,” one resident instructed the publication. “We’re very pleased with him.”
Who’s Liang Wenfeng?
Wenfeng was born in 1985 and was a straight-A scholar in class, per the Wall Street Journal.
Earlier than founding DeepSeek, Wenfeng pursued an schooling in engineering. Based on The New York Times, he has a technical background in AI engineering and wrote his 2010 thesis on bettering AI surveillance methods at Zhejiang College, a public college in Hangzhou, China. He graduated from Zhejiang with a grasp’s diploma in info and communication engineering.
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Wenfeng based the hedge fund Excessive-Flyer in June 2015 on the age of 30, per the Chinese language publication QQ.com. He and his crew had been decided to make use of math and AI to ship sturdy outcomes for purchasers.
Excessive-Flyer skilled regulatory pressures from 2019 to 2023, main the crew to focus extra on AI as a facet challenge and construct computing methods with Nvidia graphics playing cards. Wenfeng formally based DeepSeek in July 2023. The AI firm turned extra of a spotlight for him after Excessive-Flyer needed to shut down its major funding product in February 2024, per The Instances.
In a 2023 interview with Chinese language tech publication 36KR, Wenfeng mentioned that DeepSeek’s aim was common synthetic intelligence, or AI that surpasses human cognitive talents. He additionally mentioned that AI startups had been well-positioned to compete with established firms.
“The market is altering,” Wenfeng instructed the publication based on an English-translated version of his remarks, which had been initially made in Chinese language. “The actual decisive power is usually not some ready-made guidelines and situations, however the capacity to adapt and modify to modifications.”
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