This is Liang Wenfeng, founder & CEO of DeepSeek

His tiny AI startup just shook Silicon Valley and the whole AI world with it

This is Liang Wenfeng, founder & CEO of DeepSeek. His tiny AI startup just shook Silicon Valley and the whole AI world with it.

Wenfeng's story is fascinating.

In a world obsessed with flashy tech announcements & billion-dollar valuations, Liang Wenfeng operates differently.

The founder of DeepSeek, who sparked a global conversation about AI in 2024, remains remarkably grounded for someone who just shifted the technological landscape.

Born in 1985 to a schoolteacher father in Zhanjiang, a modest city in China's Guangdong province, Liang's journey defies conventional Silicon Valley narratives.

While his peers dreamed of overseas education, he stayed local, earning his degrees in electronic engineering from Zhejiang University.

It was there that he began exploring the intersection of math, computing, & market behavior 🧠

In 2015, Liang and two university classmates founded High-Flyer Asset Management, pioneering the use of artificial intelligence in China's quantitative trading space.

The firm grew rapidly to manage over $12 billion at the peak, but encountered significant challenges in 2021 when market volatility exposed limitations in their AI models 💸

But rather than discourage him, these setbacks sparked a deeper curiosity about AI's fundamental architecture.

What sets Liang apart is his philosophical approach to innovation. "More investment doesn't necessarily lead to more innovation," he often says 👏

And he's right.

While competitors raced to accumulate GPUs, DeepSeek focused on efficiency, developing novel approaches that achieved comparable results with significantly fewer resources.

Partly because they had no choice...

Yet, their breakthrough V2 model demonstrated unprecedented cost-effectiveness, performing inference tasks at about 1/7 the cost of GPT-4.

Perhaps most remarkably, Liang chose to make DeepSeek's code open-source, believing that tech advancement should benefit everyone, not just elite institutions.

"Open source is more of a culture rather than a commercial behavior," he explains, "and contributing to it earns us respect."

Today, despite sparking a market rout that wiped nearly $1 trillion from tech valuations, Liang maintains his focus on research & technological innovation.

He leads a team of bright young researchers, many fresh from China's top universities, who share his vision of achieving AGI through methodical exploration rather than brute-force computing power 🤖

The DeepSeek story challenges long-held assumptions about AI development, proving that groundbreaking innovation can emerge from unexpected places.

As Silicon Valley grapples with this new reality, Liang continues his quiet pursuit of excellence, guided by a simple principle:

Tue progress comes not from following established paths, but from having the courage to forge new ones.

Author

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