Short but fascinating history of the founder of DeepSeek, the AI model that has taken the world by storm in the last few days.

It was founded by a rather eccentric hedge fund billionaire, Liang Wenfeng!

In 2008, Wenfeng understood the potential of AI.

For many years, he tried to find the perfect niche market to use AI.

After failing multiple times, he settled on finance — trading stocks.

He used AI (deep learning) to detect patterns.

Wenfeng decided to start a hedge fund. He named it “High-Flyer.”

Founded in 2015, it soon became one of the largest “quant funds” in China.

And he became a billionaire!

But… he was soon enamored with Generative AI, which is “smarter” than just detecting patterns. It was about creativity — the Holy Grail of AI.

In 2021, he started his “side project” to explore AI.

All his business partners thought he was simply a crazy billionaire, who wanted a new AI toy.

He started buying Nvidia chips, although they were low-end models (H800) — due to US sanctions.

In 2023, he founded DeepSeek.

Then he started recruiting the smartest graduates from top Chinese universities like Tsinghua and Peking.

Everyone told him he could never compete against Google, Microsoft, Alibaba etc., because, “You need tens of thousands of GPUs & billions of dollars!”

However, thinking out of the box, DeepSeek engineers figured out a way to develop a self-training AI model for under $6 million.

It took just two months!

(Known as Reinforcement Learning AI, the program can learn on its own by trial & error, without supervision by humans).

And it’s now beating all the LLM from the AI giants who burn billions of dollars every year!

DeepSeek R1 is as good as or better than the AI products from Open AI, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Amazon AWS etc.

The end.

Vir: S.L. Kanthan