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.
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. Much of the early startup culture was described by former employees to be "geeky" and "quirky," often seen as contrary to the existing culture in large Chinese tech companies. 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. 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. Liang's aggressive pricing of the language model forced domestic tech giants including Alibaba and Baidu to cut their own rates by over 95%. As the goal was long-term, DeepSeek sought employees who had ability and passion rather than experience. 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.
Sam Altman, CEO of
OpenAI, praised DeepSeek-R1's performance, but expressed confidence that OpenAI could deliver models with better performance. == Reception and impact ==