Around noon on January 20, DeepSeek’s founder, Liang Wenfeng (梁文锋), had the company release the DeepSeek-R1 model, whose performance can match the official version of OpenAI’s o1. Immediately afterwards, he left for Zhongnanhai to attend a symposium on Premier Li Qiang’s government work report—he was the only representative from an LLM company present at the symposium.