The Chinese are celebrating the huge success of a domestic startup called DeepSeek and its founder these days, after the company's latest form of artificial intelligence shocked American tech giants.
"DeepSeek is crashing US stocks overnight," reads one popular hashtag with tens of millions of views on the Chinese social network Weibo. "DeepSeek is making Meta panic," reads another, referring to the American tech giant that has invested enormous resources in developing its own AI models, nova.rs writes.
More than a dozen hashtags related to this groundbreaking technology were trending on Weibo earlier this week, while DeepSeek climbed to the top of international app store charts, overtaking OpenAI's ChatGPT on Monday.
Who is the man behind DeepSeek?
DeepSeek's founder, Liang Venfeng, has been hailed as a technological visionary who could help China create a culture of innovation capable of rivaling Silicon Valley.
The engineer-turned-entrepreneur, who rarely gives interviews, is known for hiring exclusively domestic talent and keeping his AI models open source, allowing other companies and users to test and develop them, reports Index.hr.
Liang, who co-founded AI-focused hedge fund High-Flyer Quant, founded DeepSeek in 2023. The company's latest model, the DeepSeek R1, unveiled on January 20, can almost rival its much better-known American rivals, including OpenAI's GPT-4, Metin Llama, and Google's Gemini.
However, according to the company, the DeepSeek R1 cost less than six million dollars to build—a fraction of the investment of other competitors.
"Sputnik moment"
Renowned technology investor Marc Andreessen called this model a "Sputnik moment," while US President Donald Trump said on Monday that this was a "wake-up call" for America in its technological rivalry with China.
Technological dominance, particularly in the field of artificial intelligence, has become a key battleground between the two powers, with the US in recent years restricting Chinese companies' access to chips that could accelerate AI development.
Analysts say more information is needed to verify DeepSeek's claims about the cost of developing its model, and warn that the app operates within strict restrictions on speech and information imposed by the Chinese government. This means that when asked about the Tiananmen Square massacre or the pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong, the AI assistant will likely reflect Beijing's official stance - or simply refuse to respond.
However, for many in China, the success of this technology – with Liang's vision and ethics – represents a significant leap forward in international competition.
"No matter how powerful the indigenous people are, they can be destroyed overnight," reads one triumphant comment on Weibo, which has garnered more than a thousand likes.
"Liang's achievements can be called a national destiny," wrote another user.
CNN has contacted Liang, DeepSeek and High-Flyer Quant for comment.
"Changing the rules of the game"
Born in the 1980s to a primary school teacher, Liang grew up in a small town in southern China's Guangdong province. According to Chinese state media, he studied information and electronic engineering at the prestigious Zhejiang University in eastern China's technology hub Hangzhou.
His early business associates, interviewed in recent days by state-linked financial outlet Yicai, described the future DeepSeek founder as a bit “nerdy,” recalling his “terrible haircuts” of the past.
According to the same source, Liang then talked about his idea of training large AI models and "changing the rules of the game," but no one took him seriously. Such endeavors were usually considered possible only for Chinese tech giants like ByteDance or Alibaba, Danas reports.
Liang co-founded artificial intelligence-focused hedge fund High-Flyer Quant in 2015, less than a decade after graduating, according to state media reports. The company integrates AI and machine learning models into its operations, according to its website.
A computer the size of a basketball court
At the same time, the company has accumulated computing power into an AI supercomputer the size of a basketball court, becoming one of China's leading firms in terms of computing power - and the only one that wasn't a tech giant, according to state-run publication The Paper.
In 2023, Liang founded DeepSeek with the goal of advancing general artificial intelligence – and, it seems, changing the innovation culture in China.
"We often say that there is a gap of one to two years between China and the US, but the real gap is between originality and imitation. If that doesn't change, China will always be a follower," Liang said in a rare media interview with Chinese financial-tech outlet 36Kr in July last year.
The rise of DeepSeek roughly coincides with the gradual easing of aggressive state repression of Chinese tech giants, which the authorities have been carrying out to reassert control over innovative private firms that, in their eyes, have become too powerful.
But Beijing also places great importance on technological self-sufficiency, with Chinese leaders pledging over the past year to strengthen the country's independence and strength in technology - especially in the context of growing competition with the United States.
Liang appeared to be referring to the difficulties caused by US technology export controls in an interview with 36Kr last year, saying that the challenge for his company was not money but the ban on access to "high-quality chips."
Still, he expressed optimism about China's future competitiveness.
"When society allows true innovators to succeed, the collective mindset will change. We just need more concrete examples and processes," Liang said.
"We don't do mediocre things"
The company, which has teams in Beijing and Hangzhou, has remained relatively small, with only about 140 researchers and engineers, according to state media – significantly fewer than the large firms in China and the US that are leading the development of AI models.
DeepSeek's official WeChat profile states: "We don't do mediocre things. We solve the biggest questions with curiosity and a vision that reaches far into the future."
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