Liang Wenfeng (born 1985 in Zhanjiang, Guangdong, China) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman, best known as the founder and CEO of DeepSeek, an AI startup gaining attention for its ability to compete with industry leaders. Before founding DeepSeek in 2023, Liang built a career in finance and artificial intelligence, co-founding the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, which now manages $8 billion. He previously established the investment firm Jacobi (or Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management Co Ltd) in 2013, where he developed AI-driven stock-picking algorithms. Despite his company's growing influence, Liang has maintained a low profile, focusing on refining AI models and expanding his ventures.
Liang Wenfeng's Background and Early Life
Liang Wenfeng was born in 1985 in Zhanjiang, Guangdong, China, to parents who were both primary school teachers. He pursued higher education at Zhejiang University, earning a Bachelor of Engineering in electronic information engineering in 2007 and a Master of Engineering in information and communication engineering in 2010. His master's dissertation focused on improving target tracking algorithms for low-cost surveillance cameras, an area that later became a key topic in Chinese AI development.
During his university years, Liang showed an early interest in financial markets, forming a team in 2008 to gather market data and explore quantitative trading using machine learning techniques. After graduating, he moved to Chengdu (Sichuan), where he experimented with AI applications across different fields, ultimately finding success in finance.
Career and Achievements
- 2013 – Founded Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management Co Ltd (Jacobi) with Xu Jin, an alumnus of Zhejiang University, and integrated AI with quantitative trading.
- 2016 - In February 2016, Liang and two engineering classmates co-founded Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership). The team leveraged mathematics and AI to drive their investment strategies.
- 2019 – Established High-Flyer AI to focus on AI algorithm research and applications.
- 2021 – Began acquiring large numbers of Nvidia GPUs for AI projects while running High-Flyer.
- 2022 - By 2022, High-Flyer had assembled a cluster of 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs, essential for developing and operating AI systems.
- 2023 – Founded DeepSeek, an AI startup focused on developing artificial general intelligence.
- 2024 – DeepSeek released its V2 model, triggering an AI price war in China.
- 2025 – Launched DeepSeek R1, a 671-billion-parameter AI model, which quickly became the #1 free app on the U.S. iOS App Store, causing significant market disruption.
DeepSeek: The Company a Disruptive Force in AI
DeepSeek was founded as an independent AI research company in July 2023, spun off from High-Flyer’s artificial general intelligence lab. Initially backed by High-Flyer, the startup struggled to attract venture capital due to skepticism about its short-term profitability.
The company quickly gained prominence in May 2024 with the release of DeepSeek-V2, an AI model offering high performance at a low cost. This move triggered an AI price war in China, with major tech firms like ByteDance, Tencent, Baidu, and Alibaba slashing their prices to compete. Despite its aggressive pricing, DeepSeek remained profitable, unlike its larger rivals.
DeepSeek’s hiring strategy prioritizes technical ability over experience, favoring recent graduates and developers from diverse backgrounds. This approach has helped the company expand its AI’s capabilities beyond traditional fields, enabling breakthroughs in areas such as poetry generation and excelling in China’s Gaokao exams.
In early 2025, DeepSeek released R1, an open-source reasoning model with 671 billion parameters. R1 outperformed OpenAI’s o1 on key AI benchmarks, offering a cost-effective alternative. Available under an MIT license on Hugging Face, it quickly gained traction, inspiring over 500 derivative models and millions of downloads. The launch sent shockwaves through the global AI industry, even contributing to a sharp drop in U.S. tech stocks, including a $500 billion loss in Nvidia’s market value.
Shortly after R1’s success, DeepSeek introduced Janus-Pro, an advanced multimodal AI model. Janus-Pro-7B surpassed OpenAI’s DALL-E 3 and Stability AI’s Stable Diffusion in text-to-image generation, further solidifying DeepSeek’s position as a leading AI innovator.
Despite its disruptive impact, DeepSeek remains focused on research rather than commercialization. Its open-source approach and cost-effective models have positioned it as a formidable competitor to Western AI giants, drawing both praise and concern from industry leaders.
DeepSeek's Android app has reached No. 1 on the Google Play Store, following its chatbot app topping the Apple App Store. Since mid-January, it has been downloaded over 1.2 million times on the Play Store and 1.9 million times on the App Store. The actual installs may be higher, as the Play Store indicates over 5 million downloads.
Notable Quotes by Liang Wenfeng
“To be honest, we didn’t really care, it was just something we did along the way. Providing cloud services is not our main goal. Our aim is still to achieve A.G.I. (artificial general intelligence)” Interview with the Chinese tech medi 36Kr.
“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 said, in 2023, during an interview with the tech media outlet Waves.
"Even if OpenAI is closed-source, it cannot stop others from catching up. Open-source is like a cultural practice, rather than a business practice … a company that does this will have soft power. In the past 30 years, (China's tech industry) has only emphasised making money, and ignored innovation. Innovation is not solely driven by business, it also needs curiosity and a desire to create." July 2024
"Currently, neither tech giants nor startups have an unassailable lead. With OpenAI paving the way, everyone is working with published papers and open-source code. What we see is that Chinese AI can’t be in the position of following forever. We often say that there is a gap of one or two years between Chinese AI and the United States, but the real gap is the difference between originality and imitation.If this doesn’t change, China will always be only a follower — so some exploration is inescapable.” Waves interview in November 2024.
If you know of any other insightful quotes made by Liang Wenfeng, we would love to hear from you! Please feel free to share them with us. To submit your suggestions, visit our "Contacts" page, where you’ll find the email address to send your contributions.
Sources
DeepSeek launches new AI model as Trump cautions of ‘wake-up call’ to US industry - Global Times
DeepSeek claims its ‘reasoning’ model beats OpenAI’s o1 on certain benchmarks - TechCrunch
DeepSeek reaches No. 1 on US Play Store - TechCrunch
Who is Liang Wenfeng? DeepSeek founder comes from AI investing - TechCrunch
Who is Liang Wenfeng, the founder of AI company DeepSeek? - ABC News
Who Is the Founder of the A.I. Start-Up DeepSeek? New York Times