Meet Liang Wenfeng, the hedge fund manager behind Chinese AI startup DeepSeek

• If you follow AI news, you’ve probably heard of DeepSeek.
• The Chinese AI startup made a big splash with its flagship model R1, which it says rivals OpenAI’s o1 at a fraction of the cost.
• Who’s leading the AI company that has Silicon Valley on edge? Here’s a look at founder Liang Wenfeng.

While ChatGPT’s launch made OpenAI CEO Sam Altman a household name in the AI community, DeepSeek’s founder is still much lesser-known stateside.

The Chinese AI startup has taken the AI community by storm with the buzzy launch of its open-source AI model R1, which DeepSeek says rivals OpenAI’s o1 model in performance “across math, code, and reasoning tasks,” while using a fraction of the computing power.

So who’s leading the company that sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and the AI industry at large?

Here’s a quick look at DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng’s background and career rise.

Upbringing and education

Wenfeng grew up in the 1980s in “a fifth-tier city” in Guangdong, China, he said in a translated July 2024 interview that was published this month. His father was a primary school teacher.

He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees from Zhejiang University, one of China’s oldest and best-ranked universities.

Chinese e-commerce founder and former Pinduoduo CEO Colin Huang also studied at the school.

His career began in finance

In 2015, Wenfeng and two of his classmates from Zhejiang University created a quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, whose website says it “relies on mathematics and AI for quantitative investment.”

High-Flyer had at least $10 billion in assets under management by 2019, according to its site.

In 2021, Wenfeng began scooping up thousands of GPUs from Nvidia while running High-Flyer, Financial Times reported, with one of his business partners describing him to the publication as a “very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models.”

Wenfeng launched DeepSeek in May 2023 as an offshoot of the High-Flyer, which funds the AI lab.

The startup made waves with its V3 model late last year.

In a paper released in late December, DeepSeek researchers estimated they built and trained the model using 2,000 Nvidia H800 chips at a cost of under $6 million, significantly less than many of its AI competitors.

X owner Elon Musk, for example, has said his platform’s AI chatbot Grok 3 is training on 100,000 of Nvidia’s H100 GPUs. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last January that the company would purchase 350,000 Nvidia H100 GPUs by the end of 2024.

DeepSeek then stunned Silicon Valley again with the launch of its R1 model on January 20, 2025.

Wenfeng’ approach to running DeepSeek

Wenfeng said in the 2024 interview that his main focus for DeepSeek is researching large models and achieving artificial general intelligence.

“Our principle is neither to sell at a loss nor to seek excessive profits. The current pricing allows for a modest profit margin above our costs,” he said in the translated interview.

He’s also said the company “won’t go closed-source,” adding, “We believe that establishing a robust technology ecosystem matters more.”

Wenfeng says China’s AI industry has been playing catch-up with the US, and he wants DeepSeek to change that.

“We believe that China’s AI cannot remain a follower forever. Often, we say there’s a one- or two-year gap between Chinese and American AI, but the real gap is between originality and imitation,” he said in the translated interview. “If this doesn’t change, China will always be a follower.”