Liang Yuanpeng attends the China Premier Forum. /Courtesy of CCTV

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup DeepSeek's AI model "DeepSeek R1" is shaking the global AI industry, drawing attention to its founder. Established less than two years ago, DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng, born in 1985 and majoring in computer engineering.

According to Sing Tao Daily and others on the 28th (local time), Liang Wenfeng was born in Guangdong Province, China. He excelled in mathematics during middle and high school. His middle school homeroom teacher reported that Liang Wenfeng "even learned college-level mathematics." He entered Zhejiang University, a prestigious engineering school, in 2002, where he earned a bachelor's degree in electronic information engineering in 2007 and a master's degree in information and communication engineering in 2010.

Liang Wenfeng researched quantitative trading, an investment technique using computer programs, and established the hedge fund "High Flyer" in 2015. His hedge fund reportedly managed assets worth up to 100 billion yuan (approximately 20 trillion won) in 2021, earning a place among the "Four Kings" in China's quantitative private equity sector.

In 2019, Liang Wenfeng established a department within the hedge fund to create an AI deep learning platform to refine investment techniques, and in 2021 invested 1 billion yuan to create a system composed of 10,000 NVIDIA A100 graphics processing units. At that time, it was known to be the only company in China to possess A100.

A colleague who worked with Liang Wenfeng at the time stated to the Financial Times (FT), "He was a strange person with a terrible hairstyle and talked about building a cluster of 10,000 chips," and added, "We didn't take him seriously."

After these efforts, Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in May 2023 with employees he had worked with at the hedge fund. According to the FT, Liang noted at the time of founding that he aimed to "develop human-level AI."

Industry insiders remarked that "DeepSeek's office feels like a university campus for serious researchers," indicating that it focuses solely on AI research. Another industry insider stated, "DeepSeek is a dangerous competitor because it has the will to share research rather than pursue commercial profit."