Who Is Behind DeepSeek? Here’s What To Know About Founder Liang Wenfeng

[Chip (OP)]

Source: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tylerroush/2025/01/28/who-is-behind-deepseek-heres-what-to-know-about-founder-liang-wenfeng/

 The man who founded DeepSeek, the artificial intelligence company that rattled the U.S. stock market, is 40-year-old Liang Wenfeng, a former hedge fund manager who said he shifted into tech to close the gap between China and the U.S. in the AI industry.

Key Facts

Liang told Chinese outlet Waves he grew up in Guangdong, China, in the 1980s—reportedly the child of teachers in the area, which is now known for its tech industry—and he later received a bachelor’s and master’s degree in information and communication engineering from Zhejiang University, according to Reuters.

In 2015, Liang co-founded High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund that relies on “mathematics and AI” to create investment strategies.

High-Flyer created its first AI model in October 2016, allowing the company to take its first stock position based on AI projections after previously relying on “traditional machine-learning algorithms.”

High-Flyer started using AI models to develop nearly all of its stock positions by 2017, after which the hedge fund hired a research team dedicated to “AI algorithms and [their] basic applications.”

Liang started accumulating thousands of Nvidia graphics processors for a then-unnamed AI project in 2021, just before the Biden administration restricted trade of those chips to China, according to the Financial Times.

Liang founded DeepSeek in 2023, and the company relied on maximizing the output of processors available in China while being unable to acquire Nvidia’s chips, the Financial Times reported, citing an AI researcher close to the company.