Deepseek AI Shakes Up the Big Tech Market
This week, the Chinese artificial intelligence Deepseek made waves in the Big Tech industry. Its creator, entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, has quickly risen to prominence in China’s tech scene in just a few weeks. Since launching his AI in 2023, Wenfeng has kept a low profile, rarely speaking to the press while maintaining his reserved approach.
Who created DeepSeek?
DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng, an enthusiastic AI entrepreneur born in 1985 in Guangdong, China. Wenfeng holds both a degree and a master’s degree in Electronic and Information Engineering from Zhejiang University.
In 2015, he co-founded High-flyer, an investment fund based in Hangzhou, a major tech hub in China home to giants like Alibaba, the parent company of Aliexpress.
A colleague of Wenfeng shared with The Financial Times that he was “a very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle” and admitted that they didn’t take him seriously when he first started training AI models.
How was the creation of DeepSeek
In 2019, High-Flyer, the investment fund co-founded by Liang Wenfeng, was established with a focus on the development and application of AI negotiation algorithms. The company will begin utilizing these algorithms in negotiations by 2021.
Around this time, Liang made a strategic move—he purchased thousands of Nvidia processors before the U.S. imposed chip-buying restrictions. He then set up a parallel laboratory within High-Flyer to work on creating General Artificial Intelligence (GAI).
This laboratory eventually evolved into a startup in May 2023, with High-Flyer continuing as one of its key investors.
Why does Deepseek become famous now?
A week after the release of DeepSeek-R1, the Chinese AI application skyrocketed to the top of the App Store’s most downloaded-list.
The version has caused a stir in the market, gaining popularity for being a free AI for users, in contrast to its equivalent, ChatGPT’s OpenAI-O1, which costs around $200 per month.
What’s more, DeepSeek-R1 is open-source, meaning its source code is available for developers to improve, fix errors, and enhance the AI’s efficiency.
Despite the development costs of the Chinese AI being less than $6 million—a fraction of the expense of other AI models—the performance has amazed the market. As a result, stocks of major players like Nvidia, OpenAI, Alphabet (Google’s parent company), and Microsoft took a significant hit.
