Liang Wenfeng

Overview

Liang Wenfeng is a Chinese entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of DeepSeek, an AI company whose DeepSeek-R1 model was released on 20 January 2025.^[1][3] DeepSeek grew out of an AI research lab at High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund that Liang co-founded.^[2] AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is a term for AI that can handle a broad range of intellectual tasks rather than one narrow task.

Education and early research

Liang studied at Zhejiang University, earning a bachelor’s degree in electronic information engineering in 2007 and a master’s in information and communication engineering in 2010. His master’s thesis was on object tracking, the task of following a moving object through video, using a low-cost pan-tilt-zoom camera.^[1] Object tracking belongs to computer vision, the field concerned with getting computers to interpret images and video.

Key contributions

DeepSeek-R1 is a reasoning model, meaning it is trained to work through a problem step by step before answering. Reinforcement learning, the training method used here, gives a model feedback on whether its outputs are correct so that it improves over time. On 17 September 2025, Nature published the paper “DeepSeek-R1 incentivizes reasoning in LLMs through reinforcement learning,” on which Liang is the corresponding author.^[3] Nature is a peer-reviewed journal, so the paper went through review by outside experts before it appeared. The corresponding author is the researcher who handles correspondence about the paper and is the main contact for questions about it. Reinforcement learning is a broad family of methods in which a system improves its behaviour from reward signals.

Positions

In February 2016 Liang co-founded Ningbo High-Flyer with two engineering classmates. The firm is a quantitative hedge fund, which makes investment decisions using mathematical models and data. It reportedly managed over 10 billion yuan by 2019. In a 2019 keynote, Liang said its funds were run by servers, with no portfolio managers making decisions.^[1][2] Quantitative funds of this kind depend on data analysis and automated trading rules, so their operation relies heavily on computing infrastructure.

DeepSeek was founded on 17 July 2023 as a spin-off of High-Flyer’s AGI research lab. High-Flyer holds about 99% of the company, and Liang holds about 1%.^[2]

On 20 January 2025, the day DeepSeek-R1 was released, Liang attended a symposium hosted by Premier Li Qiang. On 17 February 2025 he attended a private-sector symposium with Xi Jinping.^[1]

Impact

Liang was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People of 2025, and to the TIME100 AI 2025 list.^[4][5] His career has combined finance, where he started, with AI research, and the two meet in DeepSeek, since its research lab grew out of High-Flyer. In comments to Chinese media, he said DeepSeek was not aiming for quick profit and wanted to help drive the wider AI ecosystem forward.^[1]