Meet Liang Wenfeng, the man behind Chinese AI startup DeepSeek, rival of ChatGPT, Google Gemini

DeepSeek, an artificial intelligence chatbot, has become the talk of the town as it is giving tough competition to Sam Altman's ChatGPT and Google Gemini. It is made by Chinese tech startup DeepSeek which upended some tech stocks. Not just that, DeepSeek's AI assistant became the No. 1 downloaded free app on Apple's iPhone store Monday, propelled by curiosity about the ChatGPT competitor. It has fuelled debates over the economic and geopolitical competition between the US and China in developing AI technology. But do you know who is the man behind DeepSeek? His name is Liang Wenfeng.

Who is Liang Wenfeng?

Liang Wenfeng comes from the world of finance. He founded DeepSeek in 2023 in Hangzhou, China and released its first AI large language model later that year. The 40-year-old currently serves as the CEO of DeepSeek. He previously co-founded one of China's top hedge funds, High-Flyer, which focuses on AI-driven quantitative trading. He is the CEO of High-Flyer. He graduated from Zhejiang University with degrees in electronic information engineering and computer science.

His DeepSeek began attracting more attention in the AI industry last month when it released a new AI model that it boasted was on par with similar models from US companies such as ChatGPT maker OpenAI. It was more cost-effective in its use of expensive Nvidia chips to train the system on huge troves of data. The chatbot became more widely accessible when it appeared in Apple and Google app stores early this year.

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