Who is Liang Wenfeng? Chinese businessman behind DeepSeek, AI App which overtook ChatGPT, spooked US markets

China's AI company, DeepSeek, has shaken the AI industry and the markets after it took over its rival ChatGPT as the most downloaded free app in the US.

DeepSeek was founded by Liang Wenfeng in 2023.

Who is Liang Wenfeng?

Liang, 40 is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman with a background in finance. In 2015, he co-founded the quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, after completing graduation from Zhejiang University. Through High-Flyer, he used AI for trading strategies to predict market trends and help make investment decisions.

In 2021, he started buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processors as an AI side project before the Joe Biden-led US government restricted US exports of AI chips to China, according to the Financial Times (FT). During this time, his acquaintances saw this AI side project as a quirky hobby without any goal.

“When we first met him, he was this very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models. We didn’t take him seriously,” one of Liang’s business partners told FT.

“He couldn’t articulate his vision other than saying: I want to build this, and it will be a game change. We thought this was only possible from giants like ByteDance and Alibaba,” he added.

Liang Wenfeng's AI side project

Even though DeepSeek was viewed as a side project initially, Liang was personally involved in the company and its research. He also plans to make DeepSeek a homegrown leader in AI by recruiting top talent from Chinese universities and paying them at a scale of local top social media platform TikTok's parent company ByteDance.

DeepSeek app is an AI-enabled platform launched recently for tasks such as natural language processing, data analysis, and various machine learning applications, similar to ChatGPT.

Impact of DeepSeek on US markets

After its launch, the US market crashed, especially the Big Tech stocks such as Nvidia, which reported 17% fall, while the Nasdaq composite declined 5% on Monday.

The Nasdaq Composite closed down 3.1%, with a dip at one point wiping more than $1tn off the index from its closing value of $32.5tn last week, The Guardian reported.