- China’s internet is in love with Liang Wenfeng after his firm, DeepSeek, sparked an AI uproar in the US.
- His burst of stardom has come largely off the back of a subsequent market rout in the US.
- Local media are now calling Liang a “genius,” an “AI hero of Guangdong,” and a “great god.”
As US tech stocks roiled on Monday from the hype about Chinese startup DeepSeek, the company’s founder is being lauded as a hero back home.
Hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, who started the artificial intelligence firm as a side project in 2023, went viral on Chinese social media on Tuesday largely because of the rout.
DeepSeek’s cost-effectiveness was already making waves in the tech industry over the last two weeks, but it was the latest market reaction that pushed Liang into internet stardom in China.
DeepSeek’s story is now that of a Chinese startup — which says it spent $6 million building a large language model rival to ChatGPT — shocking investors and AI scientists so much that US stocks like Nvidia lost a collective $1 trillion in on-paper value within a day.
In a bout of national pride, viral threads on Weibo, China’s version of X, regularly referenced Liang’s hometown of Zhanjiang in Guangdong province.
“DeepSeek is a megahit: internet users buzz about three AI heroes of Guangdong,” said one top thread with 18 million views, as of Tuesday morning Beijing time.
Liang was listed as one of those “heroes,” alongside Moonshot AI’s founder, Yang Zhilin, and the AI scientist He Kaiming, who is an author of one of the most-cited papers on machine learning.
Notably, China’s social media is heavily moderated, making it difficult to determine the full scope of discussion on any given topic. However, that can also provide insight into the rhetoric and topics that are encouraged or permitted in its online spaces.
Another major Weibo discussion, with more than 52 million views, anticipated Liang’s return to his hometown for the Lunar New Year, which begins on Wednesday. The Yangcheng Evening News, a Guangdong-based regional newspaper, praised Liang as a “genius” and “great god with foreign fame.”
“Let us wish that he shall create more miracles,” the paper wrote.
“The country must protect him! Seriously,” wrote a popular Shanghai-based blogger with 2.2 million followers.
Liang was also spotted among several advisors who gave suggestions to Chinese Premier Li Qiang at a symposium last week on Beijing’s direction on AI.
Having Li’s ear could be significant, because the premier is the top official responsible for implementing Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s executive decisions. Time Magazine, for example, described him as Xi’s COO in its 100 Most Influential People list for 2024.
But the DeepSeek founder’s presence at the symposium gained attention online more because of Liang’s age: The 40-year-old was filmed sitting among a panel of visibly older men.
“How the post-85 youth from Zhanjiang ‘surprised’ the world,” one viral thread about him said. Generations are popularly referred to as “post-1990” or “post-1980” in China, as opposed to “millennial” or “Gen Z.”
Liang, who grew up in the 1980s in Guangdong, and his firm rocked the tech space earlier this month with the release of their flagship AI model, R1, which experts say is sophisticated enough to compete with ChatGPT.
DeepSeek said it used only 2,000 Nvidia H800 chips to train R1, meaning it spent about $6 million — a cost dwarfed by the billions invested into AI by US tech giants.
As of press time, the DeepSeek app hit the number 1 spot on Apple’s Top Free Apps chart.
DeepSeek and Liang’s quant hedge fund, High Flyer, did not respond to requests for comment sent by Business Insider.
