Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng: the maths whizz who shook Big Tech

On the day of Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, the Chinese premier Li Qiang held a meeting with experts to consult on the government’s policies for the year ahead. “It was a low-key event that got little attention outside of China,” says Forbes. One of the few people to speak was Liang Wenfeng, “a bespectacled hedge-fund founder and AI entrepreneur” whose firm, DeepSeek, had just launched its latest model, R1. It took little more than a week for this relatively unknown maths whizz to morph into a disruptor of global magnitude – becoming, as the Financial Times put it, “the mysterious man who sparked an existential panic in Silicon Valley”.

Liang Wenfeng: driven by passion

By all accounts, Liang was as surprised as anyone by the ensuing trading frenzy, which wiped nearly a trillion dollars off US tech stocks. DeepSeek is now conservatively valued at at least $1 billion (a funding round this week valued its US rival OpenAI at well over $300 billion), and he owns about 84% of the Hangzhou-based firm. But money isn’t his main driver. “An exciting thing cannot be measured purely by how much its worth,” he told the Chinese media company 36Kr in 2023, adding that he’d been interested in “testing the limits of computer power since 2012”. He went on to compare acquiring sought-after Nvidia chips “to buying a piano”. You do it “because you can afford it” and “because you have a group of people who are eager to play music on it”.

Plenty of people this week have dubbed Liang China’s Sam Altman. But a better comparison than the OpenAI boss is with the legendary US “quant” Jim Simons – a pioneer of quantitative investment whose Renaissance Technologies fund has been using “machine-learning techniques” since the 1980s, says The Wall Street Journal. Liang wrote a preface to the translated Chinese version of Gregory Zuckerman’s The Man Who Solved The Market, which explored how Simons launched “the Quant revolution”. His turn towards AI, with the foundation of DeepSeek in 2023, was in many ways just a continuum.

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Born in 1985, Liang studied electronic engineering at Zhejiang University and started as a student to write AI algorithms to pick stocks. A few years after graduation, he founded investment firm Jacobi before launching High-Flyer with two college friends in 2015. “Unlike the founders of most Chinese quant funds, none of them had overseas or institutional trading experience,” says Bloomberg.

"A digital David fighting America’s Big Tech Goliath"

The trio tried different strategies – from discretionary trading to arbitrage – before settling on “a systematic approach”. They developed a tool to identify “non-linear” connections between market factors and began incorporating integrated machine learning into High-Flyer’s products – a strategy that helped High-Flyer’s funds return more than 20% compared with market benchmarks, and saw assets under management multiply to more than ¥90 billion (around £10 billion) by 2021.

There have been “bumpy patches” too, says The Wall Street Journal. In 2021, High-Flyer apologised to investors for poor performance, saying it had misread the market. Two years later, it found itself in the crosshairs of Chinese regulators as they clamped down on quants – accusing them of exacerbating market volatility. But when Liang returned to his home village for the Lunar New Year holiday last week, he received a hero’s welcome, as “a digital David fighting America’s Big Tech Goliath” and a local boy made good. Yet he is a “reluctant celebrity”. Who can blame him, given the fate of other high-flying Chinese CEOs who gained “a little too much” visibility, says TechCrunch. Colleagues say Liang “isn’t one for the trappings of wealth or fame”, says the WSJ. But he did once say that “he wanted the respect of the US-led technology world”. It’s safe to say he now has it.

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