January 28, 2025 at DeepSeek Office in Beijing.
Peter Qattar | AFP | Getty Images
The AI startup DeepSeek has emerged rapidly, shaking the AI world, but the situation of the team behind it is relatively little known outside China.
Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, is known by some in Western media Sam Altman of China. However, unlike his Silicon Valley counterparts, Liang has a low public popularity.
Liang’s team includes young graduates from some of the country’s major universities, and is also little known. Team includes Less than 140 According to Chinese state media, people have been concerned about their latest research papers R1 inference model About 200 contributors are listed. CNBC cannot confirm the official size of the team.
In addition to its core technology developers, DeepSeek mostly shares its mother Gao Pilot’s senior management team, operations staff, human resources and financial accountants, according to sources familiar with the company.
Here is an overview of the people behind AI feelings and how startups get in.
Liang Wenfeng
Liang has attracted media attention in recent weeks for DeepSeek’s chatbot Go to the top Global application chart.
He was reportedly welcomed by heroes in his hometown of China last month. spot The latest roundtable at a meeting chaired by Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang Closed-door seminar chaired by President Xi Jinping Earlier this week.
The 40-year-old founder of DeepSeek is very strange, except for two rare interviews with Chinese media 36KR last July and 2023.
The interview depicts a picture of an idealist leader who aims to achieve Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), an AI that mimics human capabilities and transforms China into a technological innovator.
Liang was born in 1985 and grew up in a port city and trade center in southern China. He is an upright student, particularly talented in mathematics. According to local media reports.
Liang Wenfeng, founder of startup DeepSeek, gave a keynote speech at the 10th China Private Equity Gold Bull Awards held in Shanghai on August 30, 2019.
VCG |Visual China Group |Getty Images
Gaofei Fund Manager
In 2015, Liang and college friend Jin Xu founded Advanced Asset Management, a quantitative hedge fund that uses complex mathematical algorithms to predict market trends and make investment decisions.
XU Is a graduate Zhejiang University’s Chu Kochen Honors Collegechoose top students from elite universities.
There, Xu focused his doctoral research on Robot autonomous navigation and machine learning – A similar postdoctoral research focus to Liang- is a Key Members A visual navigation research project for China’s lunar exploration program.
Xu worked in the software development of Huawei Technology in the early 2010s and is now leading the technical development and handicraft trading strategies of Gao Pilot. His profile page on the private equity database Paipaiwang shows.
Senior Flyer CEO Zhengzhe Lu graduated from the same university with Liang and Xu and then received his master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Politics.
Before the climax, Lu worked in a state-backed Chinese merchant bank where he interacted with it Macro research and overseas derivatives invest.
exist Interview with Chinese state media in 2023“We have built a new team that is independent of investment, equivalent to a second startup,” Lu said, and later became DeepSeek. “We want to do more value and things beyond the investment industry.”
According to Paipaiwang, the two managed some of the best-performing funds under the company’s portfolio, with an average return of more than 20% in 2024, according to Paipaiwang. Last year in the CSI 300 index, this exceeded about 15% gains, up 5% in the small CSI 500.
The profits of the quantitative fund were transferred to fund the rise of DeepSeek, Liang Telling 36 KR in 2023.
The Brain Behind DeepSeek
In 2023, Gaofei disconnected from DeepSeek as an independent enterprise, expanding its responsibilities to surpass investment and focusing on Pursuing Agi.
The team consists primarily of local engineering, computer science and AI graduates from top Chinese universities such as Tsinghua University and Peking University, many of whom have published their latest papers on disciplines such as language models and machine learning.
According to their LinkedIn profile, many team members are also graduates from top American universities with experience in NVIDIA and Microsoft, and they decided to return to the AI industry that has grown in China.
The key attribute that makes the team unique is age, as DeepSeek prefers graduates with less work experience.
Instead, “they strongly tuned degrees, awards from international programming competitions, research papers published in top industry journals,” DeepSeek told CNBC.
In the interview Liang said in 2023 that in the long run, experience is less important, “basic ability, creativity and passion are more important.”
In 2024He said that while AI’s top 50 talents may not be in China, DeepSeek’s goal is to develop its own.
Senior graduates seem to attract companies as well It is said that Higher salary and higher degree Bottom-up management More than found in a large tech company.
Zihan Wang, former Deepseek employee Talked with MIT Technology Review in JanuaryHe has gained abundant computing resources and freedom to experiment at DeepSeek.
