The rise of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek caused a meltdown in US tech stocks on Monday (Jan 27).
Nvidia on Monday suffered a wipeout of nearly US$600 billion in its market value – the most for any stock ever on Wall Street.
DeepSeek soared to the top of Apple Store’s download charts, as an alternative that is said to be able to perform on a par or even outperform Open AI and Meta’s models – and able to be built more cheaply and take up less power.
The DeepSeek-R1 model is 20 to 50 times cheaper to use than the OpenAI o1 model, depending on the task, according to a post on DeepSeek’s official WeChat account.
Who is the founder and entity behind DeepSeek
Who is behind this Chinese startup that has shaken up US tech titans and other global stocks that are part of the AI supply chain?
DeepSeek is based in Hangzhou and its controlling shareholder is Liang Wenfeng. The 40-year-old graduated from Zhejiang University with a degree in AI, said Chinese media reports.
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He co-founded quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Quant in 2015, which became known for innovatively using AI-driven trading strategies, according to Chinese media publication CGTN.
The fund announced in 2023 that it was going beyond trading to focus on creating a new research arm to explore “artificial general intelligence”, Reuters reported.
High-Flyer also owns patents related to chip clusters used to train AI models, Chinese corporate records showed.
Liang began buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processors in 2021 as an AI side project, the Financial Times reported. That was before the Biden administration began limiting US exports of AI chips to China.
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