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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.