Liang Wenfeng has gone from boyish, bespectacled math whiz to world tech determine in a single day because of DeepSeek’s explosive impression on the bogus intelligence trade.
The millennial math nerd – who reportedly wore a sweater vest, go well with jacket and no tie to a gathering with the Chinese language premier final week – is behind DeepSeek, the Chinese language AI startup that shook the worldwide sector with claims it developed a complicated mannequin in only a few months at a fraction of the price of US rivals.
Liang, known as China’s Sam Altman, didn’t begin as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, however moderately a math geek who launched his personal hedge fund only a few years after graduating from school.
Born in 1985 and raised in Zhanjiang, China, Liang was a straight-A scholar who studied calculus and wrote AI algorithms in his free time, in response to The Wall Avenue Journal.
A number of years after graduating from the distinguished Zhejiang College, he launched his personal quantitative hedge fund, Excessive-Flyer, with two laptop scientist friends, the report stated.
The fund used a man-made intelligence algorithm to select shares – and as we speak manages some $8 billion, making it one among China’s largest quant funds, in response to the Journal. It has not all been clean crusing, although, issuing a public apology to its traders in 2021 for underperforming benchmark indexes.
He was deeply impressed by Jim Simons, the chain-smoking quant genius behind the Lengthy Island agency Renaissance Applied sciences positioned some 8,000 miles away – even penning the introduction to a Chinese language model of a Simons biography.
“Whenever I encounter difficulties at work, I recall Simons’s words: ‘There must be a way to model prices,’” Liang wrote in his introduction to Simons’ biography.
Over the previous 5 years, at the very least 5 funds managed by Excessive-Flyer have produced common extra returns of greater than 20% in comparison with market benchmarks, in response to monetary information supplier Simu Paipaiwang.
In 2021, simply earlier than the Biden administration began limiting exports of AI chips, Liang started shopping for hundreds of Nvidia graphics processors with the purpose of stockpiling 10,000, in response to the Monetary Instances. His colleagues didn’t assume a lot of the facet undertaking.
“When we first met him, he was this very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models. We didn’t take him seriously,” one among Liang’s enterprise companions informed the Monetary Instances.
“He couldn’t articulate his vision other than saying: ‘I want to build this, and it will be a game change.’”
By late 2022, when OpenAI launched ChatGPT, solely a handful of Chinese language firms had greater than 10,000 Nvidia chips available — and Excessive-Flyer was one among them, in response to the Journal.
“It is like buying a piano,” Liang informed Chinese language tech publication 36Kr in 2023, discussing the chip purchases. “Firstly, it’s because you can afford it. And secondly, it’s because you have a group of people who are eager to play music on it.”
In 2023, Liang based DeepSeek, which on Monday claimed it spent about $6 million to coach its superior AI mannequin – a fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to coach comparable rivals.
“Liang built an exceptional infrastructure team that really understands how the chips worked,” a founder at a rival LLM firm informed the FT. “He took his best people with him from the hedge fund to DeepSeek.”
In contrast to ChatGPT, DeepSeek’s AI mannequin is open supply, which means anybody can entry it, a call Liang made in an effort to ding main tech corporations’ monopoly.
“For technologists, having others follow your work gives a great sense of accomplishment,” he informed 36Kr final yr. “Open source is more of a culture rather than a commercial behavior, and contributing to it earns us respect.”
His staff have known as him a hands-on boss, generally sleeping in a single day within the workplaces alongside colleagues whereas engaged on particular tasks, and placing little effort into his hair and clothes, in response to the Journal.
He has been holding a low profile, and was reportedly shocked to see DeepSeek blow up in a single day, sources informed the Journal.
