In technology, many entrepreneurs get only one defining act. Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, is already on his second.
The engineer, described by colleagues as introspective, first made his mark in China’s investment world in the late 2010s, cofounding a hedge fund that used artificial-intelligence models to deliver strong returns and attracted billions of dollars in capital.
Buoyed by profits and wary of Beijing’s tightening grip on speculative trading, Mr. Liang pivoted in 2023. He poured money into artificial intelligence, betting on A.I. chips and assembling a team to build China’s answer to the Silicon Valley front-runner OpenAI.
Now, just two years later, DeepSeek has upended the global tech landscape. How did he do it and what you need to know about Liang Wenfeng?
He’s a deeply technical engineer. That puts him in a line of other successful Chinese tech executives.
When Chinese technologists debated why the country’s biggest investors and tech firms failed to anticipate the rise of generative A.I., many pointed to a single culprit: China’s companies were obsessed with quick returns in a fiercely competitive market.
Armed with those lessons — and backed by his own trading windfall — Mr. Liang has made it clear his ambitions lie far beyond commercial applications.
His focus, he has said, is on what he sees as China’s only real chance to catch up with the United States. That means taking bold, idealistic swings at fundamental A.I. challenges. His primary ambition is to create artificial general intelligence or A.G.I. — the elusive goal of building machines that can think and learn like humans.
When DeepSeek undercut its Chinese competition last year by offering its model at bargain prices, forcing larger rivals into their own price cuts, Mr. Liang dismissed the significance.
“To be honest, we didn’t really care — it was just something we did along the way,” he said in a widely shared interview with 36Kr, a Chinese tech outlet. “Providing cloud services is not our main goal. Our aim is still to achieve A.G.I.” (DeepSeek has remained mostly silent this week and has not responded to requests for comment.)
In his convictions that superhuman artificial intelligence is just around the corner, Mr. Liang sounds a lot like OpenAI’s chief executive, Sam Altman. But the similarities end there. Mr. Liang, a low-profile executive with a deep technical background in A.I. engineering, more fits the mold of Pony Ma, a co-founder of China’s Tencent, than Silicon Valley’s charismatic visionaries.
He started as a hedge fund trader. And then he turned to pure A.I. research.
In many ways, Mr. Liang’s career traces the major shifts in China’s technology landscape.
His 2010 thesis at Zhejiang University tackled what would soon become one of the hottest topics in Chinese A.I.: improving intelligent tracking algorithms for surveillance cameras.
Later, the hedge fund he co-founded was buffeted by regulatory pressures, eventually forcing the closure of one of its main investment products, according to Peter Alexander, managing director of Z-Ben Advisors, a market consultancy, who researches Chinese hedge funds.
“Between 2019 and 2023, they wanted to have this side project so that their Ph.D.s felt like they had something to do and so DeepSeek originated from that,” Mr. Alexander said.
“But it really went into overdrive when their primary investment product had to shut down in February of 2024,” he said.
In a way, it was China’s crackdown on the private sector that nudged DeepSeek toward long-term A.I. research.
He’s willing to try things other entrepreneurs will not. He even hired lit majors.
If you polled China’s A.I. experts on who would deliver the country’s first major generative A.I. breakthrough, few would have picked Mr. Liang. That included the Chinese government.
DeepSeek was a private company with no apparent state backing, no big-name alliances and none of the institutional heft of players like Baidu, the search giant. In a system that favored insiders, Mr. Liang was not one.
Yet, there’s precedent for that. Some of China’s most disruptive tech companies — Huawei, Alibaba, ByteDance — started outside the spotlight, only to redefine their industries.
Mr. Liang’s approach has been as unconventional as his company’s rise. He has emphasized intellectual exploration over sheer grind. His hiring philosophy is equally unorthodox — DeepSeek’s engineering teams haver been joined by literature buffs to help refine the company’s A.I. models.
“Everyone has their own unique journey and brings their own ideas with them, so there’s no need to push them,” he said in the 36Kr interview.
In a tech culture defined by grueling hours and hierarchy, that outlook borders on Bohemian. Yet, Mr. Liang insists change is necessary if China wants to lead in frontier A.I. innovation.
“When ChatGPT came out, the entire industry in China lacked the confidence to pursue frontier innovation,” he said.
“Innovation starts with confidence — and we often see that more from young people.”
Alexandra Stevenson contributed reporting from Hong Kong.
