BANGKOK (AP) — The 40-year-old founding father of China’s DeepSeek, an AI startup that has startled markets with its capability to compete with business leaders like OpenAI, saved a low profile as he constructed up a hedge fund after which refined its quantitative fashions to department into synthetic intelligence.
Liang Wenfeng, who based DeepSeek in 2023, was born in southern China’s Guangdong and studied in japanese China’s Zhejiang province, residence to e-commerce large Alibaba and different tech companies, in keeping with Chinese language media reviews.
The hedge fund he arrange in 2015, Excessive-Flyer Quantitative Funding Administration, developed fashions for computerized inventory buying and selling and started utilizing machine-learning strategies to refine these methods.
Like many Chinese language quantitative merchants, Excessive-Flyer was hit by losses when regulators cracked down on such buying and selling prior to now yr. Nevertheless, it reportedly manages $8 billion in belongings, ample assets for funding DeepSeek’s AI analysis.
It additionally has ample computing energy for AI, since Excessive-Flyer had by 2022 amassed a cluster of 10,000 of California-based Nvidia’s high-performance A100 graphics processor chips which are used to construct and run AI methods, in keeping with a publish that summer season on Chinese language social media platform WeChat. The U.S. quickly after restricted gross sales of these chips to China.
“Thing is, we are sure now that we want to do this, can do this, and are capable of doing this, so we’re among the best-suited candidates to tackle it at this moment,” Liang informed Waves, a tech media outlet, in 2023.
“Currently, neither tech giants nor startups have an unassailable lead. With OpenAI paving the way, everyone is working with published papers and open-source code,” it quoted him as saying.
Liang stated he spends his days studying papers, writing code, and collaborating in group discussions, like different researchers.
DeepSeek is exploring what intelligence means, he stated.
“People may think there’s some hidden business logic behind this, but it’s mainly driven by curiosity,” Liang stated.
When DeepSeek was requested, “Who is Liang Wenfeng?” its first reply was to call a unique Chinese language entrepreneur with the identical identify, a minimum of as spelled in English letters.
When requested: “Where is Liang Wenfeng from and where did he go to university?” it stated that as of October 2023, the newest information cutoff for DeepSeek’s R1 AI mannequin, “there is no publicly available information about Liang Wenfeng’s background, including his place of origin or educational history.”
“If you are referring to the founder of DeepSeek, details about his personal life or academic background have not been disclosed publicly. For more information about DeepSeek, you can visit its official website,” it stated.
Liang’s targeted method matches in along with his dedication to push AI studying ahead. After a long time of counting on innovation from the West, he says China needs to be making its personal contributions.
“What we see is that Chinese AI can’t be in the position of following forever. We often say that there is a gap of one or two years between Chinese AI and the United States, but the real gap is the difference between originality and imitation,” he stated in one other Waves interview in November. “If this doesn’t change, China will always be only a follower — so some exploration is inescapable.”
Related Press author Ken Moritsugu in Beijing contributed to this report.
