Before he became the CEO of world-beating AI lab Deepseek, Liang Wenfeng 梁文锋 was best known for founding High-Flyer (幻方), one of China’s t

Deepseek: From Hedge Fund to Frontier Model Maker

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2024-12-09 22:30:19

Before he became the CEO of world-beating AI lab Deepseek, Liang Wenfeng 梁文锋 was best known for founding High-Flyer (幻方), one of China’s top hedge funds.

High-Flyer is a quantitative fund that manages around $8 billion worth of assets. In Mandarin, the company’s name is “magic square,” a reference to the quirky mathematical object thought to have been first discovered in China.

How and why did High-Flyer start down the path of frontier LLM research? In this interview from May 2023, translated here by former Deepseek intern and first-year CS PhD student at Northwestern Zihan Wang, Deepseek’s CEO lays out a grand strategy for AGI development. It explores:

WeChat, Archive link. Interview by An Yong Waves (暗涌Waves, a 36kr subbrand), published May 24, 2023. Text by Lily Yu 于丽丽. Edited by Liu Jing 刘旌. Translated by Zihan Wang 王子涵.

This is a game destined for a select few. Many startups, after large corporations enter the market, begin to adjust their direction or even consider retreating, but this quant fund continues to forge ahead alone.