Liang Wenfeng
In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, certain visionaries stand out for their ability to not just innovate, but to fundamentally shift the landscape. Liang Wenfeng is one such figure, a Chinese entrepreneur who rose from a quiet village to co-found a leading quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, and later launch DeepSeek, an AI company that sent shockwaves through the global tech industry. His journey reveals how a focused, long-term vision—even amidst skepticism and geopolitical challenges—can redefine what's possible in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence. Liang Wenfeng demonstrated extraordinary aptitude for mathematics and self-directed learning from a young age, opting for a path in AI and finance over an early opportunity with DJI. His quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, quietly amassed vast computing resources, which were then strategically repurposed to fund and develop DeepSeek, an independent AI research powerhouse. DeepSeek's release of highly efficient, open-source AI models like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrated frontier performance with significantly fewer resources, triggering a global AI 'Sputnik moment' and reshaping competition.
AI Summary
In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, certain visionaries stand out for their ability to not just innovate, but to fundamentally shift the landscape. Liang Wenfeng is one such figure, a Chinese entrepreneur who rose from a quiet village to co-found a leading quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, and later launch DeepSeek, an AI company that sent shockwaves through the global tech industry. His journey reveals how a focused, long-term vision—even amidst skepticism and geopolitical challenges—can redefine what's possible in the pursuit of artificial general intelligence.
- Liang Wenfeng demonstrated extraordinary aptitude for mathematics and self-directed learning from a young age, opting for a path in AI and finance over an early opportunity with DJI.
- His quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, quietly amassed vast computing resources, which were then strategically repurposed to fund and develop DeepSeek, an independent AI research powerhouse.
- DeepSeek's release of highly efficient, open-source AI models like DeepSeek-R1 demonstrated frontier performance with significantly fewer resources, triggering a global AI 'Sputnik moment' and reshaping competition.
The Prodigy from Mililing
Born in 1985 in the small village of Mililing, in Wuchuan city, Guangdong, Liang Wenfeng's journey began far from the bustling tech hubs. His parents, both primary school teachers, nurtured an early environment of learning that would prove foundational.
From a young age, Liang displayed an uncommon intellect, particularly in mathematics. Even in middle school, while his peers might have focused on more typical pursuits, he was known for devouring comic books and being incredibly proficient in advanced math—often teaching himself university-level concepts.
His academic brilliance continued at Wuchuan No. 1 High School, where he consistently ranked among the top students. He even achieved the highest score in the Zhanjiang region on the rigorous Gaokao, China's college entrance exam. This exceptional talent allowed him to enter Zhejiang University at the remarkably young age of 17.
A Defining Choice
At Zhejiang University, Liang earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic Information Engineering and later a Master's in Information & Communication Engineering. His master's dissertation focused on 'Object Tracking Algorithm Based on Low-Cost PTZ camera'—a hint at his burgeoning interest in AI applications.
It was during his university years that Liang faced a pivotal decision. Frank Wang, the founder of DJI, a company that would soon revolutionize the drone industry, invited Liang to join as a co-founder. Yet, Liang declined, driven by a singular vision: to apply artificial intelligence to the complex world of financial markets.
From Algorithms to Riches: The High-Flyer Story
After graduation, Liang moved to a modest flat in Chengdu, determined to make his AI ventures succeed. He initially explored diverse applications, facing a string of failures. But his persistence paid off when he turned his focus to finance.
The 2008 financial crisis provided an unexpected catalyst. Liang formed a team with classmates, delving deep into financial market data and exploring the then-nascent field of quantitative trading using machine learning. This was the seed of his future empire.
This early work culminated in the co-founding of Hangzhou Yakebi Investment Management in 2013, followed by Hangzhou Huanfang Technology (now Zhejiang Jiuzhang Asset Management) in 2015. These ventures solidified his approach: leveraging AI for algorithmic trading.
Building a Quant Powerhouse
In February 2016, Liang, along with two engineering classmates, co-founded Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management. High-Flyer embraced a 'geeky,' math-driven culture, standing apart from the more traditional tech giants in China at the time.
By 2019, High-Flyer had become a significant player, managing over 10 billion yuan in assets. Liang also established High-Flyer AI, a dedicated research arm focused on advanced AI algorithms and their foundational applications.
Liang became a prominent voice in the quantitative finance community. In a keynote speech in 2019, he articulated High-Flyer's philosophy: true quantitative investment relies on algorithms and servers making decisions, not human portfolio managers. Their mission, he declared, was to enhance the efficiency of China's secondary market.
He found inspiration in figures like Jim Simons, the legendary founder of Renaissance Technologies. Liang even penned the preface for the Chinese edition of Gregory Zuckerman's book on Simons, often reflecting on Simons' mantra: 'There must be a way to model prices.' This shared dedication to algorithmic insight hinted at Liang's own notoriously secretive nature, much like Simons himself.
The Secret Project: Birth of DeepSeek
While High-Flyer thrived, Liang secretly embarked on an ambitious side project. Beginning in 2021, he started acquiring thousands of Nvidia GPUs, often against the skepticism of his business partners who believed such large-scale AI endeavors were only possible for tech giants.
Liang was convinced he was building a 'game changer.' He saw the path to artificial general intelligence—AGI—and in May 2023, he publicly announced High-Flyer's pursuit of AGI, simultaneously launching DeepSeek, his dedicated AI company.
Crucially, DeepSeek secured 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the US government imposed restrictions on AI chip sales to China. This strategic foresight laid the essential hardware foundation for DeepSeek to emerge as a formidable large language model (LLM) developer.
DeepSeek's funding model is also unique: it's almost entirely backed by High-Flyer, with Liang personally holding only 1% of the company. This structure frees DeepSeek from immediate venture capital pressures and rigid KPIs, allowing its researchers to explore unconventional model architectures and pursue long-term, fundamental AI advancements.
DeepSeek's Impact: A New Era of AI
DeepSeek quickly made waves. In July 2024, the release of DeepSeek-V2 ignited an unexpected AI 'price war' in China. The model's aggressive pricing strategy forced domestic tech giants like Alibaba and Baidu to slash their own rates by over 95%, demonstrating DeepSeek's disruptive power.
Liang emphasized his vision for China's innovation: to be a contributor, not a 'freerider.' He believed China lacked not capital, but the confidence and knowledge to organize talent effectively for disruptive technologies, asserting that closed-source approaches could only temporarily delay global catch-up.
DeepSeek's culture mirrored this philosophy. It prioritized ability and passion over mere experience, fostering a low-hierarchy, project-based environment. This bottom-up approach, Liang noted, led to significant breakthroughs, like the multi-head latent attention training architecture—a key innovation in DeepSeek-V3, developed by a young researcher's personal interest, that dramatically reduced training costs.
The Sputnik Moment: DeepSeek-R1
Then came January 20, 2025. DeepSeek released DeepSeek-R1, a 671-billion-parameter open-source reasoning AI model, accompanied by a detailed technical paper. This wasn't just another model; it was a statement.
What made DeepSeek-R1 truly remarkable was its efficiency. Built using just 2,048 Nvidia H800 GPUs at a cost of $5.6 million, it achieved frontier performance with substantially fewer computational resources than its Western counterparts—a critical achievement amidst US sanctions limiting China's access to advanced chips.
The reaction was immediate and profound. By January 27, DeepSeek surpassed ChatGPT to become the #1 free app on the US iOS App Store. The market recoiled, with over $1 trillion in market capitalization wiped out from US stocks amidst widespread panic. Journalists and analysts hailed it as a 'turning point' in the global AI industry.
The Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) even likened the market reaction to a 'Sputnik moment' in the US-China tech rivalry. While CSIS noted China's continued dependence on US hardware, the Chinese Academy of Sciences unequivocally presented DeepSeek-R1 as evidence of Chinese AI surpassing OpenAI's advancements. Even OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledged R1's performance, though he expressed confidence in OpenAI's ability to achieve even better results with greater compute.
Global Recognition
Liang Wenfeng's rise to prominence was swift. On January 20, 2025—the very day DeepSeek-R1 was released—he was invited to a symposium hosted by Chinese Premier Li Qiang in Beijing, offering his expert opinions on the annual government work report.
Just a month later, on February 17, 2025, Liang found himself at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing, invited by General Secretary Xi Jinping himself, alongside other top-tier private sector leaders, to discuss the future of Chinese enterprises.
His unique blend of skills and personality earned him widespread praise. Experts often describe him as a 'geek' with an extraordinary capacity for learning and developing complex skillsets, coupled with a distinct attitude toward AI development that prioritizes long-term vision over short-term commercial gains.
In August 2025, Liang was recognized by Time magazine on its prestigious '100 Most Influential People in AI' list and also featured on Fortune's '100 Most Powerful People in Business.' By November, with a reported net worth of $11 billion, he officially joined China's exclusive list of the 100 richest individuals—a testament to the profound impact of his vision.
Article
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
Liang Wenfeng
Liang was born in 1985 in the village of Mililing (米历岭村), Qinba town (覃巴镇), Wuchuan city (吴川市), Guangdong. His parents were both primary school teachers. Liang was routinely praised by both locals and teachers alike.Even since middle school, Liang was recalled for being well-known for reading comic books, while also being very proficient in math.
Education
Liang Wenfeng
After elementary school, Liang attended Wuchuan No. 1 Middle School. There, he quickly excelled in class and ranked highly amongst his peers. He taught himself high school and university-level math courses.
Liang then attended Wuchaun No. 1 High School. In these years, he developed hobbies of mathematical modeling and conducting research projects. Compared to his peers, he was always ranked highly. For every math exam, he always ranked within the top 3. He was also the top scorer in the Zhanjiang region of Guangdong for the college entrance exam. Thus, in 2002, Liang left high school early to further pursue his education at the university level at the young age of 17.
Attending Zhejiang University at the age of 17, Liang earned a Bachelor of Engineering in Electronic Information Engineering in 2007 and his Master of Engineering in Information & Communication Engineering in 2010. His master's dissertation was titled "Study on Object Tracking Algorithm Based on Low-Cost PTZ camera" (基于低成本PTZ摄像机的目标跟踪算法研究).
In his college years, DJI founder Wang Tao asked Liang to join as a co-founder. Liang declined the invitation to pursue artificial intelligence methodologies in financial markets. 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. 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.
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 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%. 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
Liang Wenfeng
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.
On 17 February 2025, Liang, along with heads of several top-level Chinese private-sector companies, was invited to the Symposium with Private-Sector Enterprises (民营企业座谈会) hosted by General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
Recognition
Liang Wenfeng
Many experts have remarked on Liang's unique skillset and attitude towards AI development. He is often described as somebody with a unique capacity to learn and develop skillsets for his trade, while maintaining a personality that gets him called a "geek."
In August 2025, Liang was recognized by Time magazine on its list of 100 Most Influential People in AI. In the same month, he was named on Fortune's 100 Most Powerful People in Business. In November 2025, after a reported net worth of $11 billion, he was added to China's 100 richest list.