Liang Wenfeng: Meet 39-year-old DeepSeek Founder challenging OpenAI
DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, has made a huge splash in the artificial intelligence world this past week.
The release of DeepSeek’s open-source AI model is posing a challenge to industry leaders including OpenAI.
Despite having only $6 million in funding, the company is disrupting the market by surpassing established competitors in crucial areas like math and reasoning.
The meteoric rise of the company, founded by 39-year-old computer science expert Liang Wenfeng, underscores a surprising development in the ongoing US-China tech rivalry.
With the US tightening export controls on advanced GPUs such as Nvidia’s H100, Chinese companies such as DeepSeek are demonstrating that raw computing power isn’t the only way to achieve innovation by finding creative workarounds.
Liang Wenfeng: Education and Early Life
Liang Wenfeng was born in 1985 in Zhanjiang, Guangdong, to a family deeply rooted in education—his father was a primary school teacher.
This early exposure to learning and curiosity shaped Liang’s academic pursuits. He attended Zhejiang University, one of China’s most prestigious institutions, where he earned a Bachelor of Engineering in electronic information engineering in 2007.
He continued his studies at the same university, completing a Master of Engineering in information and communication engineering in 2010. These formative years laid the foundation for his future endeavors in technology and innovation.
The birth of DeepSeek
DeepSeek’s roots trace back to High-Flyer, one of China’s top quantitative hedge funds. Liang Wufeng, who holds a master’s degree in computer science, initially led High-Flyer’s deep-learning research branch, Fire-Flyer, which used supercomputers to analyze financial data.
In 2023, Liang decided to pivot Fire-Flyer’s resources toward building DeepSeek, aiming to develop artificial general intelligence (AGI). “I wouldn’t be able to find a commercial reason for founding DeepSeek,” Liang told Chinese tech publication 36Kr. “Basic science research has a very low return on investment. But we’re doing this because we believe in the mission.”
DeepSeek’s research team is composed primarily of recent graduates from top Chinese universities like Peking University and Tsinghua University. Many of these young researchers have already made a name for themselves in academic circles, publishing in top journals and winning international awards.
