The Chinese geek that challenges Silicon Valley giants

Hangzhou Deepseek, the Chinese company that challenges Silicon Valley giants, is a startup Founded by Liang Wenfeng, a 40 -year -old engineer passionate about technology and convinced that artificial intelligence can change the world.

Although it seems out of nowhere, Depseek is based in Hagzhou, a Metropolis of the East of China where several technological giants of the country are based, which has earned him the nickname of the Silicon Valley china.

Little known abroad, Depseek had long aroused great interest in China.

He bot Deepseek R1 conversational left experts overwhelmed for their results and profitability, given the small costs of their development. In addition, in China they extolled their alleged capacity to avoid US sanctions that seek to hinder access to sophisticated chips required by revolutionary artificial intelligence (AI).

On Monday, Depseek’s emergence shook the bags and caused a collapse of the American semiconductor manufacturer Nvidia on Wall Street, whose losses were around 600 billion dollars of stock market capitalization, the largest recorded so far by a company in the stock market .

Deepseek was created by a prodigy of technology and finance, Liang Wenfeng: born in 1985, graduated in engineering at the prestigious University of Zhejiang in Hangzhou.

He dedicated years to try to apply AI in various fields, according to an interview he offered last year to the Chinese portal Waves.

By 2015 he founded High-Flyer, an investment company specialized in the use of AI to analyze the stock market trends. His technique allowed him to reach tens of thousands of assets of assets under management, which made it one of the main quantitative coverage funds in China.

We simply do things at our rhythm, we calculate the costs, prices. Our principle is not subsidizing [al mercado] nor generate huge benefitsexplained Liang.

According to the newspaper Financial Timesin 2021 Liang began to buy graphic processors of the US specialist Nvidia for a parallel projectsomething confirmed by a local medium.

Liang “was not at all as a boss, but rather a geek” With one terrifying learning capacitytheir partners told Waves.

That project parallel, apart from stock markets, is a chatbot Based on generative: a product that has just shake the US universe of technology … and that brought Liang Wenfeng to the ins and outs of Chinese power.

First appearance

The businessman appeared last week with other key representatives of the business world during a meeting with Prime Minister, Li Qiang. In images of CCTV state television a man of curly hair and thick mount glasses listening to the president.

One moment Sputnik

Deepseek’s success in question the colossal sums invested by US giants in the development of an advanced generative AI, and the effectiveness of Western sanctions when it came to preventing Chinese rivals from equalizing them or even overcoming them.

President Donald Trump recognized him: it is a alarm signal For Silicon Valley.

“One moment Sputnik” (Allusion to the shock in the West in 1957 when the Soviet Union put in orbit the first artificial satellite), described Marc Andreessen, a renowned investor of the sector.

And this, at the risk of Washington, will even more harden the restrictions imposed on Chinese technological companies.

In his interview with Waves, Liang Wenfeng already stressed last year that those restrictions were the most difficult obstacle to overcome: Money has never been a problem for us. The problem is the embargo on high -end chips.

However, regardless of geopolitical fluctuations, Liang expressed his hope that the rise of AI can help better understand the entrails of the human spirit.

We propose the hypothesis that the essence of human intelligence could be language, that human thought could essentially be a linguistic processhe pointed out. “What you consider ‘thought’ could be, in fact, your brain weaving language.”