China's AI company DeepSeek has become a significant challenger to ChatGPT, emerging as the most downloaded free app in the US
Founded in 2023 by Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, who is 40 years old, DeepSeek is altering the AI terrain.The 40-year-old Liang is a Chinese businessman. In 2015, he established a quantitative headge fund of the High-flyer after graduation from Segients University, and used that AI for trading tactics to predict Market trends and make investment trends
In 2021, when the US government under Joe Biden was imposing restrictions on AI chip exports to China, Liang started buying thousands of NVIDIA graphics processors for an AI side project.
"When we first met him, he was talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his models. He seemed like a dull person with an unusual hairstyle, so we didn't take him seriously," said one of Liang's business partners.
"He didn't elaborate much on his vision except saying, 'I want to build this, and it will be a game changer.' We thought it could only be possible for giants like ByteDance or Alibaba," the partner added.
Though it was conceived as an ancillary project, Liang was heavily invested in the firm and its research. He himself recruited China's top students, with payment on par with the best but comparable to what they would earn at leading firms like ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok. His goal was to build DeepSeek into an industrial leader in AI.
Sweeping US Markets DeepSeek stunned the US markets. When this AI was introduced, it gave a massive jolt to US markets, making major tech stocks like NVIDIA tumble by 17% and the NASDAQ Composite fall by 3.1%.
Meanwhile, US President Donald Trump said that the technology of Chinese startup DeepSeek should inspire American companies and that it would be good for Chinese companies to bring a cheaper and faster method of artificial intelligence to the world.
DeepSeek is an AI platform recently developed to execute operations that include natural language processing, data analysis, and other applications related to machine learning. It's on the same grounds as ChatGPT.
