Liang Wenfeng

Chinese engineer and entrepreneur, founder and chief executive of DeepSeekDeepSeek, prop. n.: A Chinese artificial intelligence company whose free, cheaply trained models startled the world in January 2025 by nearly matching the best American systems.. After studying electronic and information engineering at Zhejiang University, he co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer in the mid-2010s, which used machine learning for trading and assembled large GPUGPU, abbr.: A computer chip first designed to draw video-game graphics that turned out to be ideal for AI, because it can do thousands of simple calculations at the same time. clusters, reportedly including about 10,000 Nvidia A100 chips bought before US export controls on AI chipsexport controls on AI chips, n.: Government rules that limit which countries and companies may buy the most advanced AI chips and the machines used to make them. The United States uses them mainly to slow China's progress in AI. tightened. In 2023 he founded DeepSeek in Hangzhou, funded by High-Flyer, as a research-focused laboratory pursuing artificial general intelligenceartificial general intelligence, n.: AI that could learn and do almost any mental task a capable adult can, rather than excelling at one narrow job. Experts disagree on the exact bar and on when, or whether, it will arrive. and releasing open-weight modelsopen-weight model, n.: An AI model whose trained internal numbers are published for anyone to download and run on their own computers, even if the data and code used to make it stay private.. DeepSeek-V3 (December 2024), a mixture of expertsmixture of experts, n.: A way to build very large AI models cheaply: the model contains many specialist sub-networks, and for each word only a few are switched on, picked by a small dispatcher network. model reportedly trained for a fraction of rivals' costs, and the reasoning model DeepSeek-R1DeepSeek-R1, prop. n.: A free, downloadable AI reasoning model released by the Chinese company DeepSeek in January 2025. It matched leading American models at math and coding for a fraction of the reported cost, shaking the industry. (January 2025) rivaled leading US systems and wiped hundreds of billions of dollars off Nvidia's market value in the episode called the DeepSeek momentDeepSeek moment, n.: The shock of January 2025, when a little-known Chinese company released a free AI model nearly as good as the best American ones at a fraction of the reported cost, briefly wiping hundreds of billions off chip stocks.. He was corresponding author of the R1 paper published in Nature in September 2025. He rarely gives interviews.