Little-known facts about the father of DeepSeek

A year ago, few people in China had heard of Mililing, a sleepy village in southern Guangdong province. Now hundreds of people flock to the village every day because it is the hometown of Liang Wenfeng, 40, founder of the startup DeepSeek.

Since DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley with its reasoning AI model in January, Wenfeng has become one of China's most influential figures. Globally, he has been compared to Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI.

Villagers in Mililing even set up stalls near Wenfeng's childhood home to sell souvenirs and drinks, including zhuangyuan sugarcane juice, which was used to honor those who scored high in the ancient imperial examinations.

“China is not always just following,” Wenfeng said in an interview with the news site 36Kr in 2024. When he returned home for the Lunar New Year in late January, Wenfeng was accompanied by police, a sign of his importance to China’s tech industry.

Well-educated, good student since childhood

Wenfeng was born in 1985 to a family of teachers. At that time, China's GDP per capita was about $300 , financial services were limited, and there was no stock market. Mililing was still a traditional village, and most people knew each other.

As a child, Wenfeng excelled in public school, which emphasized mathematics and physics. In 2002, he scored the highest in the university entrance exam in Zhanjiang, Guangdong.

Wenfeng’s excellent academic performance helped him gain admission to Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. At that time, Jack Ma was working hard to develop the e-commerce startup Alibaba in Hangzhou.

A zhuangyuan sugarcane juice stall in Mililing village. Photo: SCMP .

Along with Tsinghua University and Peking University, Zhejiang University is considered a training ground for famous Chinese billionaires. Among the alumni of Zhejiang University is Colin Huang Zheng, founder of online shopping company PDD Holdings, who owns an estimated fortune of 34 billion USD .

According to SCMP , China's economic boom in the early 2000s saw many rags-to-riches stories, highlighting the importance of technology in a rapidly developing economy.

Wenfeng studied electrical engineering at university and entered the graduate program in computer vision in 2007. He graduated in 2010 with a thesis on object tracking algorithms for cameras.

Wenfeng's time studying in Hangzhou coincided with a period of economic prosperity, a booming stock market, and the explosion of the Internet in China.

Despite being approached with many high-paying jobs, he still chose his own path. Among the group of interns at school, a friend revealed that Wenfeng was the only student who asked not to come to the company.

Private lifestyle

After graduating, Wenfeng moved to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, where he worked on a project that used algorithms to trade stocks. In 2015, he and his college classmate Xu Jin founded High-Flyer Quant.

In just a few years, High-Flyer Quant quickly rose to fame, becoming one of the top four hedge funds in China, with assets under management exceeding 100 billion yuan. This amount of resources helped Wenfeng invest in a giant computer center to serve data analysis and stock selection.

In 2021, High-Flyer invested 1 billion yuan to develop a computing center, using 10,000 Nvidia graphics cards.

Despite its success, High-Flyer faces challenges. Fearing increased scrutiny from Chinese authorities, the company reduced its assets under management in 2022, paid out to investors and bought shares during the market downturn.

A 1999 class photo at Wuchuan No. 1 Middle School with Wenfeng standing in the top row, 6th from the right. Photo: SCMP .

As High-Flyer's computing resources exceeded daily trading needs, Wenfeng shifted its focus to AI research, establishing its first lab in 2019.

By 2023, just months after OpenAI launched ChatGPT, Wenfeng had rebranded the lab as an independent entity called DeepSeek, which focused on developing large language models (LLMs). The company’s products sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley.

According to SCMP , DeepSeek's launch of the open-source platform model V3 in December 2024, and the reasoning model R1 in January this year, "revolutionized" the AI ​​field in China.

In an interview, Lee Kai-fu, founder and CEO of startup 01.AI, said the company stopped developing its own model due to DeepSeek's success.

DeepSeek is cost-effective and open-source, which could make it an alternative to US-developed models. This is different from OpenAI, which operates on a closed-source model.

Wenfeng shakes hands with Chinese President Xi Jinping at a conference in February. Photo: CCTV .

Despite the global sensation he has created, Wenfeng has remained relatively low-key, with his most notable appearance coming at a summit hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping in February.

In CCTV 's video, Wenfeng did not speak during the conference, in contrast to Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei and Xiaomi founder Lei Jun.

Wenfeng also declined an invitation to attend the AI ​​Action Summit in Paris. He repeatedly avoided interviews, including when reporters stood outside DeepSeek’s headquarters in Hangzhou. Wenfeng also did not meet with potential investors or local officials, the source said.

Notably, Wenfeng does not appear on social media, a rare occurrence even among China's secretive business community.

The only evidence of his involvement with DeepSeek comes from the startup’s published scientific papers, a stark contrast to Sam Altman, who has been a frequent global promoter of OpenAI products.

Inspiring Chinese Youth

The rise of DeepSeek also poses a challenge for OpenAI, especially given its open-source strategy and market positioning. In early April, Altman shared on X that OpenAI would “launch an open, reasoning-capable weighted language model in the coming months.”

Last year, Wenfeng predicted that other AI models would soon surpass ChatGPT, even if OpenAI remained closed-source.

With a variety of techniques, DeepSeek significantly reduces the cost of training AI models. More importantly, the startup has driven a wave of AI adoption across China. While it cannot meet all the demand, many large companies such as Alibaba and Tencent have expressed their desire to integrate DeepSeek into their products.

A sign with the words "I dig for worms at Mililing", a play on the company name DeepSeek. Photo: SCMP .

DeepSeek, however, faces its own challenges. Expectations are high for the company’s new models, while the startup itself is facing problems as the U.S. tightens access to advanced chips.

Wenfeng has stated that DeepSeek's ultimate goal is to build artificial general intelligence (AGI), the stage where AI can match, or surpass, human cognition.

“LLM possesses some of the characteristics of AGI, and may be the only path to AGI,” he said. Regardless of DeepSeek’s future, Wenfeng has become an inspiration to China’s younger generation.

According to SCMP , Wenfeng’s story appeared on a poster at the primary school he attended. Teachers often used DeepSeek’s leader as an example of diligence and hard work.

When preparing to write a literary essay in China, many students affirmed that they would use this person's image to illustrate perseverance, dedication and overcoming adversity.

Source: https://znews.vn/day-la-nguoi-dung-sau-deepseek-post1547300.html