DeepSeek founder started out as low-key hedge fund entrepreneur

Associated Press

Bangkok: The 40-year-old founder of China's Deep- Seek, an AI startup that has startled markets with its capacity to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI, kept a low profile as he built up a hedge fund and then refined its quantitative models to branch into artificial intelligence. Liang Wenfeng, who founded DeepSeek in 2023, was born in southern China's Guangdong and studied in eastern China's Zhejiang province, home to e-commerce giant Alibaba and other tech firms, according to Chinese media reports.

The hedge fund he set up in 2015, High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management, developed models for computerised stock trading and began using machinelearning techniques to refine those strategies. Like many Chinese quantitative traders, High-Flyer was hit by losses when regulators cracked down on such trading in the past year. However, it reportedly manages $8 billion in assets, ample resources for funding DeepSeek's AI research. It also has abundant computing power for AI, since High-Flyer had by 2022 amassed a cluster of 10,000 of California-based Nvidia's high-performance A100 graphics processor chips that are used to build and run AI systems, according to a post that summer on Chinese social media platform WeChat. The US soon after restricted sales of those 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 told 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 opensource code,” it quoted him as saying.