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Deepseek offices in Beijing on January 28, 2025.
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The Deepseek artificial intelligence startup has shot in global prominence, shaking the world of AI, but the team behind it is relatively unknown outside China.
The founder of Deepseek, Liang Wenfeng, has been called by some in the Western media as Sam Altman from China. But unlike his counterpart from Silicon Valley, Liang has maintained a low public profile.
The Liang team, which includes young graduates of some of the country’s main universities, is also little known. The team consists of Less than 140 people, according to Chinese state media, although a research work on their last R1 Reasoning Model List about 200 taxpayers. CNBC has not been able to confirm the official size of the team.
Outside its main technology developers, Depseek has mainly shared the senior team, the operating personnel, the human resources and the financial counters of their Nodriza ship-flyer of the Nodriza ship, according to sources familiar with the company.
Here is a general description of the people behind the feeling of AI and how the startup arose.
Liang Wenfeng
Liang has received the lion’s part in the attention of the media in recent weeks as Depseek chatbot Ascended to the top of global application graphics.
Last month, according to the reports, he was welcome from a hero in his hometown of China and it was stained In a round table organized by Chinese Prime Minister Li Qiang, and more recently in a Closed Door Symposium presided by President Xi Jinping Earlier this week.
The 40 -year -old Deepseek founder has been quite shy, apart from two rare interviews with Chinese media 36kr in July last year and in 2023.
Interviews paint an image of an idealistic leader established in achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), a type of AI that mimics human abilities, and transform China into a technological innovator.
Born in 1985, Liang grew in Zhanjiang, a port city and a shopping center in southern China. He was a direct student who was particularly talented in mathematics, According to local media reports.
Liang Wenfeng, founder of the Deepseek startup, pronounces the opening speech during the tenth China private equity Bullen Bull Awards on August 30, 2019 in Shanghai.
Vcg | Visual China Group | Getty images
High flight fund manager
Zhengzhe Lu, executive director of High-Flyer, graduated from the same university as Liang and Xu, before obtaining a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Politics.
Before High-Flyer, Lu worked at Merchants Bank backed by the State, where he was committed to Macro and derived research abroad investment.
In An interview with Chinese state media in 2023Lu said: “We have established a new independent investment team, which is equivalent to a second company,” which later became a deep great. “We want to do things with greater value and things that go beyond the investment industry.”
The couple manages some of the best performance funds under the company’s portfolios, with average yields greater than 20% in 2024, according to Paipaiwang. That was above the profits of approximately 15% in the CSI 300 index last year, an increase of 5% in the CSI 500 of small capitalization.
The quantile fund earnings were partially channeled to finance the emergence of Deepseek, Liang He told 36 KR in 2023.
Brains behind Depseek
In 2023, High-Flyer went to Deepseek as an independent company, expanding its mandate beyond investment and focusing on chasing AGI.
The team consists mainly of local engineering, computer science and graduates of the best universities in China, such as the University of Tsinghua and the University of Beijing, many of which have published recent articles on topics such as language models and learning automatic.
Several team members are also graduated from the best American universities with experience in Nvidia and Microsoft who decided to return to the growing industry of the AI of China, according to their LinkedIn profiles.
A key attribute that distinguishes the team is age, since Depseek favors graduates with less work experience.
Instead, “academic titles, prizes in international programming competitions, research documents published in Top Industry Journals,” said a Deepseek cazaters to CNBC.
In the interview In 2023, Liang said that experience is less important in the long term and “fundamental skills, creativity and passion are more crucial.”
In 2024He said that while the talent of the 50 best in AI may not have been in China, Depseek aimed to cultivate his.
The main graduates also seem to be attracted to the company due to their reportedly higher wages and greater degree of management from the bottom up which could be found in a larger technological company.
