Chinese whiz built DeepSeek after big setback and is shaking Wall Street now
Liang Wenfeng’s quantitative hedge fund, Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, issued a public apology to investors after sustaining losses during a volatile period for China’s stock market. The setback was unexpected for the firm, which had rapidly become one of the country’s largest quant funds by leveraging artificial intelligence to select stocks.
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As the firm struggled to recover and its assets declined by more than a third from a peak of over $12 billion, Liang was quietly laying the foundation for a new AI startup, DeepSeek. Emerging from High-Flyer’s infrastructure, DeepSeek is now disrupting the global AI supply chain and challenging the United States’ dominance in cutting-edge AI technologies.
The rapid rise of the 20-month-old company and its breakthrough technology sent shockwaves through financial markets. On Monday, a sell-off in U.S. and European equities erased nearly $1 trillion in combined market value from chip giant Nvidia and its peers. The development has fueled both admiration and disbelief over how Liang—an engineering graduate with no overseas academic or professional experience—managed to achieve such a feat.
Despite limited access to the latest semiconductor technologies and constrained resources, Liang has demonstrated that local AI engineers can compete with, and even surpass,
