Ben Jiangin Beijing
Published: 6:30pm, 21 Jan 2025
The founder of artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek, touted as 2025’s “biggest dark horse” in the open-source large language model (LLM) arena, emerged as the industry’s new face in China at a symposium hosted by Premier Li Qiang in Beijing on Monday.
Liang Wenfeng, 40, took part in the meeting where a select group of industry experts – in the fields of technology, education, science, culture, health and sports – offered Li their opinions and suggestions for a draft government work report, according to official news agency Xinhua.
Hangzhou-based start-up DeepSeek last December made waves in the global AI industry after benchmark tests showed that its DeepSeek V3 LLM, which was built on a shoestring budget, outperformed rival models developed with more resources by the likes of Meta Platforms and ChatGPT creator OpenAI.
LLM refers to the technology underpinning generative AI services such as ChatGPT. Open source gives public access to a software program’s source code, allowing third-party developers to modify or share its design, fix broken links or scale up its capabilities.
At Monday’s meeting, Li called on the economy’s “new growth drivers”, created via scientific and technological innovation, to help “secure and improve people’s livelihoods”, according to the Xinhua report.
Liang’s participation at Monday’s meeting with Li reflects DeepSeek’s growing prominence in the AI industry.
But beyond the start-up’s recent achievements, gathering Liang’s input at the meeting reaffirms AI as a national strategic priority, according to Jeffrey Towson, founder of TechMoat Consulting.
Beijing made AI a national priority amid a heightened tech war between the United States and China, the world’s two largest economies. China’s AI market is expected to be worth 5.6 trillion yuan (US$765 billion) by 2030, according to state-backed investment vehicle China International Capital Corp (CICC).
“In the age of AI geopolitics, tech companies inevitably would have tighter connections with governments than before,” Winston Ma, a New York University Law School professor on sovereign funds, said on Tuesday.
Apart from being a regulator, “governments could be a sovereign investor or a cross-border deal mediator”, Ma said.
In September last year, CICC estimated that China’s AI industry could see US$1.4 trillion in investments over six years from 2025.
Hailing from southern Guangdong province, Liang went east to study electronics information and computer vision – a field of AI that trains computers to capture and interpret information from images and video data – at Zhejiang University in Hangzhou. Along with a group of university classmates, Liang started exploring how AI can be used to automate stock investments.
That experience subsequently led Liang to become one of the co-founders of High-Flyer Quant, which uses AI to manage one of the largest quantitative hedge funds in mainland China.
High-Flyer Quant grew its assets under management more than tenfold over a four-year span, from 1 billion yuan in 2016 to more than 10 billion yuan by 2019, according to local media reports and information from the company’s website.
“Over the years, High-Flyer Quant spent a large portion of profits on AI to build a leading AI infrastructure and conduct large-scale research,” the company said in a statement in April 2023. Months later, High-Flyer Quant spun off DeepSeek, which launched a series of AI models used by developers to build third-party applications and by the start-up to create its own chatbot.
High-Flyer Quant managed to buy more than 10,000 Nvidia graphics processing units before the US government imposed AI chip restrictions on China, according to local media outlet 36kr. On its website, the hedge-fund manager said it spent 200 million yuan and 1 billion yuan in 2020 and 2021, respectively, to build its Fire-Flyer series of AI computing clusters.
In a New Year’s Day post on social-media platform X, Jim Fan – a senior research scientist at Nvidia and lead of its AI Agents Initiative – wrote that DeepSeek has emerged as this year’s “biggest dark horse” in the open-source LLM arena, following the release of its updated namesake LLM.
“[The new AI model] shows that resource constraints force you to reinvent yourself in spectacular ways,” Fan wrote, referring to how DeepSeek V3 was developed – on a US$5.58 million budget over a two-month period – at a fraction of the capital outlay that other tech companies invest in building LLMs.
