Upstart Chinese AI company DeepSeek’s founder started out as a low-key hedge fund entrepreneur Boston 25 News [Video]

BANGKOK — (AP) — The 40-year-old founder of China’s DeepSeek, an AI startup that has startled markets with its capacity to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI, kept a low profile as he built up a hedge fund and then refined its quantitative models to branch into artificial intelligence.

Liang Wenfeng, who founded DeepSeek in 2023, was born in southern China’s Guangdong and studied in eastern China’s Zhejiang province, home to e-commerce giant Alibaba and other tech firms, according to Chinese media reports.

The hedge fund he set up in 2015, High-Flyer Quantitative Investment Management, developed models for computerized stock trading and began using machine-learning techniques to refine those strategies.

Like many Chinese quantitative traders, High-Flyer was hit by losses when regulators cracked down on such trading in the past year. However, it reportedly manages $8 billion in assets, ample resources for funding DeepSeek’s AI research.

It also has abundant computing power for AI, since High-Flyer had by 2022 amassed a …