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Meet the hedge fund manager who founded DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that began as a hobby and is now laying waste to U.S. stocks | Fortune
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Relevant to AI safety discussions around compute governance and export controls, as DeepSeek's efficiency breakthrough challenges assumptions underlying chip-based AI containment strategies.
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Summary
Profiles Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, who built the AI lab from his quantitative trading firm High-Flyer Capital Management. The article explores how his background in quant finance shaped DeepSeek's data-driven, efficiency-focused approach to AI development, and how the lab achieved frontier-level AI capabilities at a fraction of Western competitors' costs.
Key Points
- •Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek as an offshoot of High-Flyer, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund, leveraging its computing infrastructure and data expertise.
- •DeepSeek's R1 model shocked the AI industry by achieving performance comparable to OpenAI's models at dramatically lower training costs.
- •Liang's quant finance background instilled a culture of rigorous empirical testing and resource efficiency that distinguishes DeepSeek from larger AI labs.
- •The lab's success raised significant questions about US export controls on advanced chips and whether compute restrictions are sufficient to limit Chinese AI progress.
- •DeepSeek's rise has major implications for AI governance and the assumption that frontier AI requires massive capital expenditure.
1 FactBase fact citing this source
| Entity | Property | Value | As Of |
|---|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek | Founder (text) | Liang Wenfeng | — |
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Meet DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, a hedge fund manager | Fortune Home
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Success AI Meet the hedge fund manager who founded DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that began as a hobby and is now laying waste to U.S. stocks
By Jason Ma Jason Ma Weekend Editor Down Arrow Button Icon By Jason Ma Jason Ma Weekend Editor Down Arrow Button Icon January 27, 2025, 1:16 PM ET Add us on Hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng started DeepSeek in 2023. Andrey Rudakov—Bloomberg/Getty Images
Liang Wenfeng’s quant trading hedge fund High-Flyer uses artificial intelligence to predict market trends and help make investment decisions. In 2021, he started buying thousands of Nvidia chips as part of an AI side project, then launched DeepSeek in 2023.
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng doesn’t fit the profile of an artificial intelligence pioneer that’s common in the popular imagination. Unlike OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, he’s not a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.
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Instead, Liang hails from the world of finance. After graduating from Zhejiang University, he cofounded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015 and incorporated AI in its trading strategies to predict market trends and help make investment decisions.
According to the Financial Times , he began buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processors in 2021—before the Biden administration began limiting U.S. exports of AI chips to China—as an AI side project. At the time, acquaintances viewed it as a quirky hobby that didn’t look like it would go anywhere.
“When we first met him, he was this very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models. We didn’t take him seriously,” one of Liang’s business partners told the FT. “He couldn’t articulate his vision other than saying: ‘I want to build this, and it will be a game change.’ We thought this was only possible from giants like ByteDance and Alibaba.”
High-Flyer and DeepSeek didn’t immediately respond to requests to interview Liang.
Then he started DeepSeek in 2023, aiming to develop artificial general intelligence, or a level of AI that matches human intelligence.
DeepSeek is now laying waste to the U.S. stock rally , as its development of cutting-edge AI at a fraction of the cost that rivals like OpenAI and Google are spending has raised doubts about the hundreds of billions of dollars that are slated for investment in the sector and elsewhere.
On Monday, shares of Nvidia sank 17%, leading a selloff that sent the Nasdaq down 3% and the S&P 500 down 1.8%. That’s after the so-called Magnificent Seven tech companies have driven the bulk of U.S. stock gains, after the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 sparked an AI boom.
Companies outside the tech world eventually joined in the rally but are now retreating too. Constellation Energy , which has been the beneficiary of AI
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