Upstart Chinese AI company DeepSeek's founder started out as a low-key hedge fund entrepreneur

BANGKOK (AP) — The 40-year-old founder of China’s DeepSeek, an AI startup that has startled markets with its capacity to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI, kept a low profile as he built up a hedge fund and then refined its quantitative models to branch into artificial intelligence.

Liang Wenfeng, who founded DeepSeek in 2023, was born in southern China's Guangdong and studied in eastern China's Zhejiang province, home to e-commerce giant Alibaba and other tech firms, according to Chinese media reports.

The hedge fund he set up in 2015, High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management, developed models for computerized stock trading and began using machine-learning techniques to refine those strategies.

Like many Chinese quantitative traders, High-Flyer was hit by losses when regulators cracked down on such trading in the past year. However, it reportedly manages $8 billion in assets, ample resources for funding DeepSeek’s AI research.

It also has abundant computing power for AI, since High-Flyer had by 2022 amassed a cluster of 10,000 of California-based Nvidia’s high-performance A100 graphics processor chips that are used to build and run AI systems, according to a post that summer on Chinese social media platform WeChat. The U.S. soon after restricted sales of those chips to China.

“Thing is, we are sure now that we want to do this, can do this, and are capable of doing this, so we’re among the best-suited candidates to tackle it at this moment," Liang told Waves, a tech media outlet, in 2023.

“Currently, neither tech giants nor startups have an unassailable lead. With OpenAI paving the way, everyone is working with published papers and open-source code,” it quoted him as saying.

Liang said he spends his days reading papers, writing code, and participating in group discussions, like other researchers.

DeepSeek is exploring what intelligence means, he said.

“People may think there’s some hidden business logic behind this, but it’s mainly driven by curiosity,” Liang said.

When DeepSeek was asked, “Who is Liang Wenfeng?” its first answer was to name a different Chinese entrepreneur with the same name, at least as spelled in English letters.

When asked: “Where is Liang Wenfeng from and where did he go to university?” it said that as of October 2023, the most recent knowledge cutoff for DeepSeek's R1 AI model, “there is no publicly available information about Liang Wenfeng’s background, including his place of origin or educational history."

"If you are referring to the founder of DeepSeek, details about his personal life or academic background have not been disclosed publicly. For more information about DeepSeek, you can visit its official website,” it said.

Liang's focused approach fits in with his determination to push AI learning forward. After decades of relying on innovation from the West, he says China should be making its own contributions.

“What we see is that Chinese AI can’t be in the position of following forever. We often say that there is a gap of one or two years between Chinese AI and the United States, but the real gap is the difference between originality and imitation,” he said in another Waves interview in November. “If this doesn’t change, China will always be only a follower — so some exploration is inescapable.”

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Associated Press writer Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report.