Meet Liang Wenfeng, the man behind Chinese AI company DeepSeek that has left the world in awe and spooked Silicon valley

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng (right) (Photo: CCTV/ South China Morning Post)

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) company DeepSeek has made waves in the market with its new AI model, R1, which it claims rivals those of OpenAI despite relying on less advanced computer chips and consuming less energy.

This breakthrough has sparked concerns that China could be on the verge of surpassing the US in the AI race, even with restrictions on access to the most cutting-edge technology. DeepSeek’s rise is part of China’s broader ambition to lead the world in AI by 2030 and outpace the US in technological supremacy.

Within just a week of its official launch, DeepSeek’s app surpassed OpenAI’s ChatGPT in downloads on the Apple App Store in the US, according to The Spectator Index. In response to this rapid growth, US President Donald Trump called it a “wake-up call” for American tech companies, who must focus on “competing to win”.

Central to this shift is Liang Wenfeng, the visionary behind DeepSeek, who is not only driving the rise of the Chinese AI platform but also challenging the dominance of Western AI giants.

Here’s all you need to know about Liang Wenfeng:

- Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old graduate in information and electronic engineering from Zhejiang University, has made waves in the tech industry with his Chinese AI startup, DeepSeek.

- Born in the 1980s in Guangdong, China, Wenfeng’s rise to AI prominence wasn’t the usual trajectory for a tech entrepreneur. Growing up in a "fifth-tier city" with a father who was a primary schoolteacher, Wenfeng’s passion for AI was ignited at Zhejiang University, one of China’s prestigious institutions, where he completed both his undergraduate and graduate studies.

- He serves as the CEO of High-Flyer, a hedge fund that leverages AI to analyse financial data and execute quantitative trading strategies. In 2019, High-Flyer made history as the first quant hedge fund in China to raise over 100 billion yuan ($13 million), according to a report by BBC.

- In 2021, Wenfeng began acquiring thousands of Nvidia chips for a personal AI project. “When we first met him, he was this awkward guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models. We didn’t think much of it,” one of Liang’s business partners told the Financial Times in an interview.

“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.”

- In 2023, Wenfeng launched DeepSeek as a fully operational startup, quickly making a mark with its AI models. The company’s first model, DeepSeek Coder, was introduced in November 2023, followed by the 67B parameter DeepSeek LLM, and the cost-efficient DeepSeek-V2, which sparked a fierce price war across China’s AI sector. Wenfeng's aggressive pricing forced heavyweights like ByteDance, Tencent, and Baidu to cut their AI model prices.

- It wasn’t until January 2025, with the release of DeepSeek-R1, that Wenfeng truly stunned the world. The R1 model, designed for complex reasoning tasks, rivals OpenAI’s GPT-4 but was developed at a fraction of the cost—just $5.6 million, compared to the hundreds of millions spent by US tech giants.

-DeepSeek’s open-source model approach gives it a distinct edge over its rivals. This, paired with low-cost API, allows small businesses and developers with smaller budgets to tap into cutting-edge AI capabilities.

-Recently, Wenfeng attended a meeting led by China’s Premier Li Qiang, highlighting DeepSeek’s rising stature in the AI sector.