Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋)
Liang Wenfeng is the founder of DeepSeek and a co-founder of the quantitative investment firm High-Flyer (幻方量化). DeepSeek started within the High-Flyer group in May 2023; its DeepSeek-V3 (December 2024) and DeepSeek-R1 (January 2025) releases drew worldwide attention.
Background and notable work
- Early life and education: born in 1985 in Wuchuan, Guangdong (a county-level city administered by Zhanjiang); per the Zhanjiang government profile, he ranked among the top gaokao scorers in the Zhanjiang region. He entered Zhejiang University in 2002 at age 17 and earned a bachelor’s degree in electronic information engineering in 2007 and a master’s in information and communication engineering in 2010.
- Quantitative investing: per his Wikipedia entry, from 2013 he co-founded investment management companies in Hangzhou with classmates; in February 2016 he co-founded High-Flyer (Ningbo High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management), and in 2019 founded High-Flyer AI, by which time the fund managed over 10 billion yuan and had invested heavily in GPU clusters for research.
- Founding DeepSeek: in May 2023 he announced that High-Flyer would pursue artificial general intelligence and launched DeepSeek. Per his Wikipedia entry, High-Flyer holds 99% of DeepSeek and Liang personally holds 1%.
- Notable releases: DeepSeek released DeepSeek-V3 in December 2024 and the reasoning model DeepSeek-R1 in January 2025; the latter drew global attention with markedly lower training and usage costs.
- Public activities in 2025: he attended a symposium hosted by Premier Li Qiang on January 20, 2025, and a symposium with private-sector enterprises at the Great Hall of the People on February 17, 2025; in August 2025 he was named to TIME’s 100 Most Influential People in AI and Fortune’s 100 Most Powerful People in Business.
Mentioned in the show
Liang Wenfeng does not appear in the episodes quoted on this page; the following are the hosts’ relays and comments:
- In Weekly #003, in the chapter on why “no hallucination” does not mean correct judgment (Chinese transcript), Yang Pan says “borrowing from Liang Wenfeng’s earlier transcript, something like ‘we won’t do multimodal, language models are powerful enough’ — that leaked out and has now been contradicted across the board” (see that line). This is the host relaying a statement attributed to Liang Wenfeng and commenting on it; the statement itself should be read in its original source.
- In Weekly #004, in the chapter on founder-driven companies and frontier models (Chinese transcript), while discussing founder-driven companies, Xiangyang Qiaomu says “this is now the Liang Sheng version, the resolute version of Dario” (see that line), placing Liang Wenfeng alongside Dario Amodei; “Liang Sheng” (梁圣) is a nickname some netizens use for Liang Wenfeng.
Frequently asked questions
Who is Liang Wenfeng?
The founder of DeepSeek and a co-founder of the quantitative investment firm High-Flyer.
What is Liang Wenfeng’s educational background?
Zhejiang University: a bachelor’s in electronic information engineering (2007) and a master’s in information and communication engineering (2010); he enrolled in 2002.
What is the relationship between High-Flyer and DeepSeek?
Per his Wikipedia entry, DeepSeek was launched by High-Flyer in May 2023; High-Flyer holds 99% of DeepSeek and Liang personally holds 1%. High-Flyer’s quant business revenue and accumulated compute formed an important basis for DeepSeek’s early work.
When were DeepSeek V3 and R1 released?
DeepSeek-V3 in December 2024 and DeepSeek-R1 in January 2025.