Meet Liang Wenfeng, Founder Of DeepSeek AI: 'Nerdy Guy With Terrible Hairstyle'

China's AI company, DeepSeek, has caused a stir in the AI industry and financial markets after it surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in the US.

DeepSeek was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng.

Who is Liang Wenfeng?

Liang, 40, is a Chinese entrepreneur with a background in finance. In 2015, he co-founded the quantitative hedge fund - High-Flyer - after graduating from Zhejiang University. Through High-Flyer, he applied AI to trading strategies to forecast market trends and make investment decisions.

In 2021, Liang began acquiring thousands of Nvidia graphics processors as part of an AI side project, prior to the US government, under President Joe Biden, imposing restrictions on AI chip exports to China, according to the Financial Times. At the time, his peers considered this AI project to be an eccentric hobby without much purpose.

"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 of Liang's business associates told the Financial Times.

"He couldn't articulate his vision other than saying: I want to build this, and it will be a game-changer. We thought this was only possible from giants like ByteDance and Alibaba," they added.

Liang Wenfeng's AI side project

Although DeepSeek was initially regarded as a side project, Liang was heavily involved in both the company and its research. He also aims to position DeepSeek as a leading domestic force in AI by hiring top talent from Chinese universities and offering competitive salaries comparable to those at ByteDance, the parent company of the popular social media app TikTok.

The DeepSeek app, recently launched, is an AI-powered platform designed for tasks such as natural language processing, data analysis, and various machine learning applications, similar to ChatGPT.

US markets feel DeepSeek inferno

Following its release, the US stock market saw a sharp decline, particularly affecting major tech stocks such as Nvidia, which saw a 17% drop, while the Nasdaq composite fell by 5% on Monday.

The Nasdaq Composite closed down 3.1%, with one point seeing over $1 trillion wiped off its value, dropping from its previous closing figure of $32.5 trillion, according to *The Guardian*.