Liang Wenfeng: The Founder Who Had Silicon Valley Pulling Late Nights
One modest office, one very loud global wake-up call.
In a cramped office stacked with humming monitors, a bespectacled young founder taps the Enter key. Half a world away, meeting rooms scramble to stay open late. The man at the keyboard is Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek.
He didn't come up through a traditional AI track — he grew up in the world of quantitative finance, where every fraction matters. Bring that discipline to training large models and you get DeepSeek-V3 and R1: leaner on compute, surprisingly close to the top of the global leaderboards. A Zhihu thread asking whether he might become a milestone figure in Chinese AI didn't take long to climb to the top of the trending list.
The verdict is still years away — that page in the history books is, for now, blank. But he's already pulled off something quietly remarkable: he made the world's tech press genuinely curious about a small Chinese AI startup's modest room. That frame is already worth keeping.