DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng:

>> Studies machine vision at Zhejiang University

>> At 30 in 2015, launches High-Flyer quant hedge fund

>> Makes a fortune (now $8B AUM)

>> Wants to build “human” level AI as side hustle and pitches partners but they initially sceptical

>> Buys 10,000 H800 chips in 2021 and brings over his top hedge fund employees (all have tons of experience squeezing juice out of Nvidia GPUs for the fund)

>> Launched DeepSeek in 2023 and hires dozens of PhDs from top Chinese universities (Peking, Tsinghua and Beihang)

>> Pays top top top salary for tech talent only matched by Bytedance in China…wants DeepSeek to be leading “local” company

>> US export restrictions force DeepSeek team to get creative and they do, finding new training methods to make LLM models (V3, r1) competitive with OpenAI, Anthropic, Gemini, Grok, LLama etc at ~1/20th the cost

>> Training costs not exactly apples-to-apples but novel methods and clear improvements in efficiency (also questions around copying other models, larger H-100 clusters they maybe can’t talk about and/or CCP support)

>> Open sources and publishes methods (r1 reasoning paper has 200+ authors)

>> DeepSeek just hit top of App Store

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