They said only billion-dollar giants could dominate AI.
Then a Chinese startup rose to #1 on the App Store—overtaking ChatGPT in just 15 days.
DeepSeek is reshaping open-source AI at a speed no one saw coming.
Here’s how the underdog is shaking up the AI world 🧵 pic.twitter.com/E9P7xqmuQW
— Aadit Sheth (@aaditsh) January 27, 2025
Liang Wenfeng grew up in China’s southern province of Guangdong during the 80s and 90s, a time when the region was leading the country in adopting market capitalism. He pursued higher education at Zhejiang University, earning a bachelor’s degree in electronics and communication engineering and later completing a master’s degree in information and communication engineering in 2010. Before founding DeepSeek, Mr.
Liang co-founded a quantitative hedge fund named High-Flyer in 2015.
Don’t Miss @Alibaba_Qwen 2.5 VL! Despite all the Deepseek Hype, Qwen just dropped the best open Multimodal! Qwen 2.5 VL is a Vision Language Model that can control your computer, similar to the @OpenAI operator, extract structured information from charts, and more!!
TL;DR;
3️⃣… pic.twitter.com/GeEGVdl0tI— Philipp Schmid (@_philschmid) January 27, 2025
The fund leveraged complex mathematical algorithms for trading and by the end of 2021, its portfolio had grown to over 100 billion yuan ($22 billion). In April 2023, High-Flyer announced its expansion into artificial general intelligence (AGI), and DeepSeek was subsequently created.
AI Czar David Sacks says American companies will learn efficiency techniques from China's DeepSeek AI model, but big AI data centers are still needed and scaling the biggest data centers is still an advantage pic.twitter.com/SuSlhGKO3J
— Tsarathustra (@tsarnick) January 28, 2025
DeepSeek released its first AI large language model in 2023, and its chatbot became hugely popular after appearing on app stores in 2025. Unlike many Chinese tech firms that scale innovations from abroad, DeepSeek focused on developing a model that could match or surpass those by US-based OpenAI. Liang believes that China’s tech sector needs to shift from imitation to originality to lead the AI race.
Under Mr.
DeepSeek’s industry impact and innovation
Liang’s leadership, DeepSeek has opted for an open-source approach.
The burst of DeepSeek V3 has attracted attention from the whole AI community to large-scale MoE models. Concurrently, we have been building Qwen2.5-Max, a large MoE LLM pretrained on massive data and post-trained with curated SFT and RLHF recipes. It achieves competitive… pic.twitter.com/oHVl16vfje
— Qwen (@Alibaba_Qwen) January 28, 2025
This means their base code is publicly available for any developer to use and modify, a decision he argues will foster innovation and soft power in the AI industry. DeepSeek’s emergence has not gone unnoticed. The release of their AI model R1, which boasted advanced reasoning skills and was cheaper than OpenAI’s models, triggered a global tech stock sell-off.
Despite the market turbulence, Nvidia acknowledged DeepSeek’s advancements as significant for the industry. Dr. Chang Xu, an associate professor at the University of Sydney specializing in machine learning and computer vision, praised DeepSeek’s cost-efficient engineering and algorithm innovation.
He compared DeepSeek’s open-source policy to the Android era of smartphones, suggesting it could herald a new phase for AI development. Liang Wenfeng’s achievements with DeepSeek show a departure from China’s historical position of following technological advances made elsewhere. With an open-source philosophy and significant industry impacts, DeepSeek and Mr.
Liang’s work may well signal the start of a new era in AI innovation.
