Who is Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, China's OpenAI rival?

DeepSeek is an AI research lab which Liam Wenfeng founded, coming under Fire-Flyer, his hedge fund

Published on: Jan 27, 2025, 18:25:01 IST

By HT News Desk

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Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) research lab DeepSeek gained global attention after it released its open-source AI model, DeepSeek-R1, last week, rivalling industry giants like OpenAI.

The DeepSeek logo arranged on a smartphone in Hong Kong, China, on Monday, Jan. 27, 2025. Chinese startup DeepSeek's eponymous AI assistant rocketed to the top of Apple Inc.'s iPhone download charts, stirring doubts in Silicon Valley about the strength of America's lead in AI. (Lam Yik/Bloomberg)

Here's everything to know about Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek.

Also Read: DeepSeek reworks economics of AI, but is one more censorship happy Chinese firm

Liang created DeepSeek due to scientific curiosity rather than for immediate financial returns. “Basic science research rarely offers high returns on investment,” a Business Standard report quoted him as saying.

Born in 1985 in Zhanjiang, Guangdong, China, his educational background includes a Bachelor of Engineering in electronic information engineering and a Master of Engineering in information and communication engineering from Zhejiang University.

Liang reportedly moved to Chengdu, Sichuan, after graduating, to experiment with different ways of applying AI to various fields, with he not tasting success until he tried finance.

Also Read: Chinese AI Startup DeepSeek surpasses ChatGPT on Apple app store

He then co-founded the quantitative investment firm Ningbo High-Flyer in 2016. It used mathematics and AI for investment strategies.

What is Deepseek?

DeepSeek is an AI research lab which Wenfeng founded. It comes under Fire-Flyer.

Its reasoning model DeepSeek-R1 and its variants like DeepSeek-R1-Zero claim to surpass existing benchmarks on several critical tasks.

However, what is noteworthy is that DeepSeek has open-sourced not just its flagship models but also six smaller distilled variants, ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters.

Also Read: Beatles star Paul McCartney 'warns' UK government to not let AI 'rip off' artists: 'Protect the creative thinkers'

All of these models are MIT-licensed, which enables researchers and developers to freely distil, fine-tune, and commercialise their work.

Its workforce consists of fresh graduates from prestigious Chinese universities like Peking University and Tsinghua University. They look at their work as a way to overcome global technological barriers and elevate China’s status as a leader in innovation, the report quoted Liang as having said.

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HT News Desk
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