Liang Wenfeng
Founder, DeepSeek
Liang Wenfeng is the founder of DeepSeek and the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer. His lab's ultra-low-cost, open-weight R1 reasoning model triggered a global market reaction and reset assumptions about the economics of frontier AI.
Notable for
Liang studied at Zhejiang University and built his fortune through High-Flyer, a Chinese quantitative hedge fund that used machine learning for trading and stockpiled NVIDIA GPUs for research before US export controls tightened. In 2023 he founded DeepSeek as a research-driven AI lab.
Run more like a research collective than a commercial vendor, DeepSeek published detailed technical reports and released model weights under permissive licenses. Its V3 model demonstrated frontier-class results at a fraction of typical training cost, and the January 2025 release of the R1 reasoning model became a global event.
The "DeepSeek moment" briefly erased hundreds of billions in US AI and chip market value and pressured every major lab on pricing. Liang, an unusually low-profile founder, became a symbol of China's ability to compete at the frontier despite hardware constraints, and of the open-weight movement's disruptive economics.
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