Liang Wenfeng

Liang Wenfeng (Chinese: 梁文锋; pinyin: Liáng Wénfēng; born 1985) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman who is the co-founder of the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, as well as the founder and CEO of its artificial intelligence company DeepSeek.

Liang attended Zhejiang University, and began his career by applying machine learning methods to quantitative finance. Through High-Flyer, he built large-scale computing infrastructure that was later used to support artificial intelligence research, leading to the creation of DeepSeek in 2023. DeepSeek gained international attention following the release of DeepSeek-R1, which analysts described as demonstrating high-level performance with comparatively limited compute resources.

In 2025, Liang was named to Time magazine's list of 100 Most Influential People in AI and Fortune's list of the Most Powerful People in Business.

Early life and education

Liang was born in 1985 in the village of Mililing (米历岭村), Tanba town (覃巴镇), Wuchuan city (吴川市), Guangdong. His parents were both primary school teachers.

Attending Zhejiang University at the age of 17, Liang received his Bachelor of Engineering in electronic information engineering in 2007 and his Master of Engineering in information and communication engineering in 2010. His master's dissertation was titled "Study on object tracking algorithm based on low-cost PTZ camera". While he states that those around him had entrepreneurial mindsets, he himself valued academics.

Career

Early career (2008–2016)

During the 2008 financial crisis, Liang formed a team with his classmates to accumulate data related to financial markets. He also led the team to explore quantitative trading using machine learning and other technologies.

After his graduation, Liang moved to a cheap flat in Chengdu, Sichuan, where he experimented with ways to apply AI to various fields. These ventures failed, until he tried applying AI to finance.

In 2013, Liang attempted to integrate artificial intelligence with quantitative trading and founded Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management Co Ltd with Xu Jin, an alumnus of Zhejiang University. In 2015, they co-founded Hangzhou Huanfang Technology Co Ltd, which is today's Zhejiang Jiuzhang Asset Management Co Ltd.

High-Flyer (2016–2023)

In February 2016, Liang and two other engineering classmates co-founded Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership). The team relied on mathematics and AI to make investments.

In 2019, Liang founded High-Flyer AI which was dedicated to research on AI algorithms and its basic applications. By this time, High-Flyer had over 10 billion yuan in assets under management.

On 30 August 2019, Liang Wenfeng delivered a keynote speech entitled "The Future of Quantitative Investment in China from a Programmer's Perspective" at the Private Equity Golden Bull Award ceremony held by China Securities Journal, and sparked heated discussions. Liang stated that the criterion for determining what is quantitative or non-quantitative is whether the investment decision is made by quantitative methods or by people. Quantitative funds do not have portfolio managers making the decisions and instead are just servers. He also stated High-Flyer's mission is to improve the effectiveness of China's secondary market.

In February 2021, Gregory Zuckerman's book The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution was published. Liang wrote the preface for the Chinese edition of the book where he stated that whenever he encountered difficulties at work, he would think of Simons' words "There must be a way to model prices". In January 2025, Zuckerman wrote in The Wall Street Journal where he acknowledged this fact and stated he has been trying to get in touch with Liang but much like Simons, Liang is very secretive and difficult to contact.

During 2021, Liang started buying thousands of Nvidia GPUs for his AI side project while running High-Flyer. Liang wanted to build something and it will be a game changer which his business partners thought was only possible from giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba Group.

DeepSeek (since 2023)

DeepSeek begins

In May 2023, Liang announced High-Flyer would pursue the development of artificial general intelligence and launched DeepSeek. During that month in an interview with 36Kr, Liang stated that High-Flyer had acquired 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the US government imposed AI chip restrictions on China. That laid the foundation for DeepSeek to operate as an LLM developer.

Liang also stated DeepSeek gets funding from High-Flyer. This was because when DeepSeek was founded, venture capital firms were reluctant in providing funding as it was unlikely that it would be able to generate an exit in a short period of time. Liang only personally holds 1% of the company, with 99% of the company being held by Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management Partnership (Limited Partnership). With DeepSeek's funding model, it lacks commercial pressure and rigid key performance indicators, enabling the company to deviate from previously established model architectures.

Early development

In July 2024, Liang was interviewed again by 36Kr. He stated that when DeepSeek-V2 was released and triggered an AI price war in China, it came as a huge surprise as the team did not expect pricing to be so sensitive. He also stated that as China's economy develops, it should gradually become a contributor instead of freeriding. What is lacking in China's innovation is not capital but a lack of confidence and knowledge on organizing talent into it. DeepSeek has not hired anyone particularly special and employees tend to be locally educated. When it comes to disruptive technologies, closed source approaches can only temporarily delay others in catching up.

As the goal was long-term, DeepSeek sought employees who had ability and passion rather than experience. To retain a high talent density relative to larger firms like Bytedance or Baidu, DeepSeek aimed to maintain a low-hierarchy corporate culture, with members working in project-based groups, as well as competitive compensation. Liang emphasized his vision for DeepSeek employees to bring their "unique experience and ideas" instead of needing to be explicitly directed, with an overall bottom-up approach to division of labor. Liang noted that a significant outcome of this approach was the multi-head latent attention training architecture, which was attributed directly to a young DeepSeek researcher's personal interest. This advancement played a core role in reducing the cost of training the DeepSeek-V3 model, released in December 2024.

Release of DeepSeek-R1

Also on 20 January 2025, DeepSeek, the company Liang founded and served as the CEO, released DeepSeek-R1, a 671-billion-parameter open-source reasoning AI model, alongside the publication of a detailed technical paper explaining its architecture and training methodology. The model was built using just 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs at a cost of $5.6 million, showcasing a resource-efficient approach that contrasted sharply with the billion-dollar budgets of Western competitors. The development of DeepSeek-R1 occurred amidst U.S. sanctions where Trump limited sales of Nvidia chips to China.

By 27 January, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT to become the #1 free app on the United States iOS App Store. U.S. stocks plummeted, as more than $1 trillion was erased in market capitalization amid panic over DeepSeek. Technology journalists and financial analysts described the release as a turning point in the global artificial intelligence industry, as it suggested the frontier performance by models could be achieved with substantially fewer computational resources than previously discovered.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies reported that some observers compared the market reaction with the Sputnik moment in the technological competition between the United States and China. However, their report challenges this characterization, stating that with an ongoing AI race, DeepSeek and other Chinese models were still dependent on U.S. hardware. In contrast, the Chinese Academy of Sciences represents the release of DeepSeek-R1 as a clear example of Chinese artificial development surpassing that of OpenAI's. Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, openly praised DeepSeek-R1's performance, but expressed confidence that OpenAI could deliver models with better performance through increased reliance on compute.

Reception and Impact

On 20 January 2025, Liang was invited to the Symposium with Experts, Entrepreneurs and Representatives from the Fields of Education, Science, Culture, Health and Sports (专家、企业家和教科文卫体等领域代表座谈会) hosted by Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing. Liang, being considered as an industry expert, was asked to provide opinions and suggestions on a draft for comments of the annual 2024 government work report.