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Fortune
Fortune
Jason Ma

Meet the hedge fund manager who founded DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that began as a hobby and is now laying waste to U.S. stocks

(Credit: Andrey Rudakov—Bloomberg/Getty Images)
  • Liang Wenfeng’s quant trading hedge fund High-Flyer uses artificial intelligence to predict market trends and help make investment decisions. In 2021, he started buying thousands of Nvidia chips as part of an AI side project, then launched DeepSeek in 2023.

DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng doesn’t fit the profile of an artificial intelligence pioneer that’s common in the popular imagination. Unlike OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, for example, he’s not a Silicon Valley entrepreneur.

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