Chinese AI chatbot DeepSeek has made waves in Silicon Valley, stunning investors and industry insiders with its ability to match the skills of its Western competitors at a fraction of the cost. The groundbreaking AI model is outperforming prominent AI players like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude AI.The chatbot has catapulted to the top of the Apple app store charts and surpassed ChatGPT, while also sending ripples through the US stock market.
This development has drawn significant interest in the tech world, especially after the company revealed its shockingly low operational costs.
From Hobby to Market Disruptor: The Man Behind DeepSeek Shaking Up US Stocks
DeepSeek was founded in late 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a Chinese hedge fund manager. Liang has quickly become a key figure in the AI space, drawing comparisons to Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. His hedge fund, High-Flyer, focuses on AI research and development, helping to fuel DeepSeek’s rapid rise.
In 2021, he started buying thousands of Nvidia chips as part of an AI side project, then launched DeepSeek in 2023.
According to Fortune Magazine, 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.
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.”
