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At 40, Liang Wenfeng has emerged as a key figure in China’s growing artificial intelligence (AI) industry, leading DeepSeek. It is an AI startup that has disrupted markets and drawn comparisons to global players like OpenAI. A product which Liang Wenfeng describes as not a business model but something that is \u201cdriven out of curiosity\u201d.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
DeepSeek launched a free AI assistant<\/a> last week that the firm says uses less data at a fraction of the cost of current services, triggering a global selloff in tech stocks.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Liang Wenfeng was born in Guangdong<\/a> and educated in Zhejiang. Before founding DeepSeek in 2023, Liang Wenfeng launched High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management in 2015, a hedge fund that specialised in algorithmic trading.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n 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 \u2013 providing both the capital and infrastructure to fuel DeepSeek\u2019s ambitions.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n High-Flyer\u2019s investments have also played a pivotal role. By 2022, the hedge fund had built a cluster of 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs<\/a>\u2014critical components for training and running advanced AI systems.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n Liang Wenfeng describes DeepSeek as an exploration into what intelligence means, driven primarily by curiosity rather than immediate commercial goals. \u201cPeople may think there’s some hidden business logic behind this, but it’s mainly driven by curiosity,\u201d Liang said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n