Liang Wenfeng

Liang Wenfeng (born 1985 in Zhanjiang, Guangdong) studied electronic engineering at Zhejiang University and made his first fortune in quantitative trading, co-founding the hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015 and stockpiling thousands of Nvidia GPUs for its trading models. In 2023 he spun that compute into DeepSeek, an AI lab with an unusual charter: pure research toward AGI, staffed largely by young domestic PhDs, with its models released as open source.

The Sputnik moment

In January 2025 DeepSeek released R1, a reasoning model rivaling OpenAI’s best, reportedly trained at a fraction of American costs — and gave it away. The app shot to No. 1 on US charts, Nvidia shed roughly $600 billion in market value in a single day, and Marc Andreessen called it “AI’s Sputnik moment.” Liang, until then nearly unknown, was summoned to meet Premier Li Qiang and became a national symbol of Chinese AI self-reliance.

In rare interviews with the outlet 36Kr, Liang argued that China’s tech industry had coasted on imitation for decades and that hardcore, original innovation — not commercialization — was DeepSeek’s purpose. His stance is not without complications: R1’s low training cost is debated, US officials have scrutinized how DeepSeek obtained restricted chips, and the model censors politically sensitive topics in line with Beijing’s requirements. His open-source strategy has nonetheless reset industry economics, with rivals from Meta to Sam Altman’s OpenAI forced to respond.