Deepseek: The Quiet Giant Leading China’s AI Race

Annotated translation of its CEO's deepest interview

Deepseek is a Chinese AI startup whose latest R1 model beat OpenAI’s o1 on multiple reasoning benchmarks. Despite its low profile, Deepseek is the Chinese AI lab to watch. Before Deepseek, CEO Liang Wenfeng’s main venture was High-Flyer (幻方), a top 4 Chinese quantitative hedge fund last valued at $8 billion. Deepseek is fully funded by High-Flyer and has no plans to fundraise. It focuses on building foundational technology rather than commercial applications and has committed to open sourcing all of its models. It has also singlehandedly kicked off price wars in China by charging very…

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