The Big Brains Behind DeepSeek

Despite being the brains behind DeepSeek, Liang Wenfeng, its founder, has kept a low profile in the public eye.

Though the team behind DeepSeek is largely unknown outside of China, the artificial intelligence startup has exploded into global prominence and upended the AI industry.

There are young graduates from some of the top universities in the nation make up Liang’s team, who are also not well-known. Chinese state media reveal that the team has fewer than 140 members, but a research paper on its most recent R1 reasoning model lists roughly 200 contributors.

According to people familiar with the company, DeepSeek has largely shared its mothership High-Flyer’s senior management team, operations personnel, human resources department, and financial accountants, with the exception of its core technology developers.

This is an outline of the people who founded DeepSeek and the creation of the startup:

As DeepSeek’s chatbot rose to the top of the global app charts in recent weeks, Liang Wenfeng Liang has garnered the majority of media attention.

According to reports, he was greeted as a hero in his hometown of China earlier this week at a closed-door symposium presided over by President Xi Jinping.

With the exception of two infrequent interviews with the Chinese media outlet 36Kr in July of last year and in 2023, the 40-year-old founder of DeepSeek has been extremely media-averse.

The interviews depict an ambitious leader who is focused on making China a technological leader and developing artificial general intelligence (AGI), a form of AI that imitates human abilities.

Zhanjiang, a port city and commercial hub in southern China, is where Liang was raised. According to reports in the local media, he was a straight-A student who excelled in mathematics.

He was admitted to Zhejiang University in 2002 after teaching himself calculus in junior high school, and in 2010 he earned both a bachelor’s and master’s degree in information and communication engineering.

Chinese technology-focused media outlet 36Kr, which interviewed Liang, said that Liang, who specializes in machine vision research, began developing machine-learning algorithms in 2008 to examine macrodata and market trends in order to make investment decisions.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) was not a common quant strategy at the time, Liang found motivation in Jim Simons, a mathematical pioneer who established Renaissance Technologies, one of the world’s most successful funds, Liang said in the introduction to the Chinese version of Simons’ biography.

High-Flyer fund manager
In 2015, Liang and college friend Jin Xu founded High-Flyer Asset Management, a quantitative hedge fund that uses complex mathematical algorithms to predict market trends and make investment decisions.

Xu was a graduate from Zhejiang University’s Chu Kochen Honors College, which selects top students at the elite university.

There, Xu focused his PhD studies on robot autonomous navigation and machine learning — similar to Liang’s focus of postdoctoral research — and was a key member of the visual navigation research project for China’s lunar exploration program.

Xu, who once worked at Huawei Technologies’ software development in the early 2010s, now leads High-Flyer’s technology development and crafts trading strategies, his profile page on private equity database PaiPaiWang showed.

Zhengzhe Lu, the chief executive officer of High-Flyer, graduated from the same university as Liang and Xu, before earning a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Politics.

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Prior to High-Flyer, Lu worked at the state-backed China Merchants Bank, where he was engaged with macro research and overseas derivative investment.

In an interview with Chinese state media in 2023, Lu said:

“We have set up a new team independent of investment, what is equivalent to a second start-up” — which later grew to become DeepSeek. “We want to do things with greater value and things that go beyond investment industry.”

The pair manage some of the best performing funds under the company’s portfolios, with averaged returns over 20% in 2024, according to PaiPaiWang. That was above gains of about 15% in the CSI 300 index last year, a 5% rise in the small-cap CSI 500.

The quant fund’s profits were partially channeled to fund the rise of DeepSeek, Liang told 36 Kr in 2023.

Brains behind DeepSeek
In 2023, High-Flyer spun off DeepSeek as an independent enterprise, expanding its remit beyond investment and focusing on pursuing AGI.

The team consists mostly of local engineering, computer science and AI graduates from top universities in China — such as Tsinghua University and Peking University — many of whom have published recent papers on subjects such as language models and machine learning.

A number of team members are also graduates from top American universities with experience at Nvidia and Microsoft who decided to return to China’s growing AI industry, according to their LinkedIn profiles.

A key attribute that sets the team apart is age, as DeepSeek favors graduates with less work experience.

Instead, “they emphasize academic degrees, awards at international programming competitions, research papers published at top industry journals,” a headhunter for DeepSeek said.

In 2024, he said that while the top 50 talent in AI may not have been in China, DeepSeek was aiming to cultivate its own.

Top graduates also appear to be attracted to the firm because of its reportedly higher salaries and greater degree of bottom-up management than what might be found at a larger tech firm.

Credit: CNBC News