The Chinese Deepseek, who sowed panic at Wall Street with its powerful conversational robot developed at low cost, is a startup founded by a genius of the persuaded hedge funds that artificial intelligence can “Change the world”and described by his loved ones as « geek » Rather than entrepreneur.
Seeming to bring out of nowhere on the world scene, Deepseek is based in Hangzhou, a metropolis in eastern China which houses the siege of many tech giants of the country -where its nickname “Silicon Valley Chinese”.
Far from the crash caused in recent days in the United States, company offices in Hangzhou and Beijing, which AFP visited on Tuesday, seemed closed for the Lunar New Year’s holidays.
Unknown abroad, Deepseek had raised a keen interest in China for some time, where he was nicknamed last year U Pinduoduo de l’IA »: Elogious reference to the popular online sales application which has struggled by breaking the prices of the major players in e-commerce like Alibaba.
Deepseek’s conversational robot R1 amazed the experts with its performance and profitability based on very limited development costs … and it was hailed in China for its apparent capacity to bypass American sanctions which aim to prevent access From the country to the sophisticated fleas necessary for the IA revolution.
Deepseek was created by a tech and finance prodigy, Liang Wengfeng: born in 1985, he graduated in engineering from the prestigious University of Zhejiang in Hangzhou, where he ensures that he was convinced that “Was going to change the world”.
He then devoted years to try to apply AI to various areas, according to an interview granted last year to the Chinese Waves site.
He ends up founding around 2015 High-Flyer, investment company specializing in the use of AI to analyze stock market trends: a technique that allows him to reach dozens of billions of yuan assets in Management, by making one of the main quantitative hedge funds in China.
“We just do things at our own pace, we calculate costs, prices. Our principle is not to subsidize (the market) or to make enormous benefits ”said Mr. Liang.
“More geek than boss”
The Financial Times reports, however, that as from 2021, Mr. Liang began to buy graphic processors from the American specialist Nvidia for a “Parallel project” -What confirms a report of a local media.
He was not “Not at all like a boss, much more a geek” with a “Terrifying learning capacity”told his partners to Waves.
Ce ” project “ Parallel outside the stock markets, it is a conversational robot based on the generative AI: a product which has just shaken the American universe of tech … and which has brought Liang Wengfeng closer to the mysteries of Chinese power.
The entrepreneur appeared last week alongside other key representatives of the business world for a meeting with Prime Minister Li Qiang, intended to evoke upcoming economic policy: state television CCTV showed a man with curly hair , with thick frame glasses, listening carefully to the manager.
“Alarm signal”
Beijing has good reasons to rejoice: the success of Deepseek questions the colossal sums invested by the American giants in the development of an advanced generative AI, as well as the capacity of Western sanctions to prevent Chinese rivals from equaling or even to exceed them.
President Donald Trump himself recognized: it is a “Alarm signal” For Silicon Valley. “A sputnik moment”reacted Marc Andreessen, renowned investor in the sector.
At the risk of amplifying Washington’s assets to further harden the restrictions imposed on Chinese technological companies.
In his interview with Waves, Liang Wengfeng already underlined last year that these American restrictions represented the most difficult obstacle to overcome: “Money has never been a problem for us. The problem is the embargo on high -end fleas ».
Beyond the geopolitical vicissitudes, he displayed his hope that the development of AI could help better understand the depths of the human spirit.
“We hypothesize that the essence of human intelligence could be language, that human thought could be essentially a linguistic process”he explained. “What you consider to be your + thought + could actually be your brain that weaves language”.
(Tagstotranslate) Depeches