Who is DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng?

As the Chinese AI lab DeepSeek gains global attention, so does the speculation about its founder. Misinformation has spread so widely that a fake account on X claiming to belong to CEO Liang Wenfeng prompted the company to issue a public clarification.

The launch of ChatGPT sparked a generative AI revolution in 2022, and now, DeepSeek’s release is generating a similar reaction. DeepSeek has surged to the top of the Google Play Store, just days after its chatbot app secured the No. 1 spot on the Apple App Store.

When asked about being called the ‘industry’s catfish’ in an interview originally published by 36Kr—a reference to a Chinese TV show where catfish symbolize market disruptors due to their cannibalistic nature—Wenfeng responded, “We didn’t set out to be a ‘catfish’ stirring up the industry. It just happened by accident.”

But who is he, really?

Born in the Chinese province of Guangdong in the 1980s, Wenfeng grew up as the son of a primary school teacher before carving out a career in finance and AI. According to reports, he launched investment firm Jacobi in 2013 and later founded High-Flyer, a Chinese hedge fund company, in 2015. The company now manages $8 billion in assets.

He was reportedly inspired by Jim Simons, founder of hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, for his mathematical approach to financial markets. He even wrote the introduction to the Chinese edition of The Man Who Solved the Market: How Jim Simons Launched the Quant Revolution, a book about Simons’ work.

In a way, he wants to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) to predict financial markets.

Han Xiao, CEO of JinaAI, described Wenfeng as a “low-key smart guy with no ego who constantly keeps learning and never wastes time on public exposure”.

Notably, the stock market crashed on Monday. Tech giants like NVIDIA, Microsoft, and Alphabet saw their stock prices plunge, while the Nasdaq 100 and Europe’s Stoxx 600 tech sub-index bled nearly $1 trillion in market cap. 

In the interview, Wenfeng argued that China’s AI progress wasn’t limited by money but by a lack of confidence and a structured ecosystem to drive research – something Silicon Valley has mastered. “More funding doesn’t necessarily yield more innovation,” he said. 

Wenfeng also contextualised this with the example of ChatGPT. “When ChatGPT first launched, the general sentiment in China – from investors to major tech firms – was that the gap was too big, so it was better to focus on applications. But innovation requires self-confidence.”

What, perhaps, makes the model stand out even more is its open-source nature. Unlike many AI founders, Wenfeng has taken an approach to make his technology free and open source. “Open source is more of a culture rather than a commercial behaviour, and contributing to it earns us respect,” he said. He has also stated that DeepSeek has no plans to go closed source. 

Meta’s chief AI scientist Yan LeCun said, “To people who see the performance of DeepSeek and think China is surpassing the US in AI, you are reading this wrong. The correct reading is: Open source models are surpassing proprietary ones.”

LeCun added that DeepSeek’s success stems from open research and tools like PyTorch and Llama, which were developed by Meta. He believes that by building on existing work and contributing back, DeepSeek has shown the power of open-source collaboration in advancing the AI ecosystem. 

Wenfeng said DeepSeek is focused on AGI, which requires developing new model structures for better performance with fewer resources. “If your goal is purely to build an application, then reusing the Llama structure and quickly pushing out a product is a reasonable choice. But our goal is AGI, which demands deeper innovation,” he explained.

Moreover, Hugging Face is replicating the entire DeepSeek R1 pipeline for the open-source community.

However, while DeepSeek’s model is open-source, its training data remains unclear. On Fox News, David Sacks, US President Donald Trump’s AI advisor, claimed there is “substantial evidence that DeepSeek distilled knowledge from OpenAI”. The US Navy has also reportedly banned the use of DeepSeek’s AI, citing “potential security and ethical concerns”. According to Reuters, the National Security Council, the US body that advises the president on foreign policy and national security, is reviewing the implications of DeepSeek’s apps, which topped the Apple App Store this past weekend.