The Chinese company DeepSeek seemed to have come out of nowhere this week when it upturned markets. Here’s what to know about the engineer who started it.

In technology, many entrepreneurs get only one defining act. Liang Wenfeng, the founder of DeepSeek, is already on his second.

The engineer, described by colleagues as introspective, first made his mark in China’s investment world in the late 2010s, cofounding a hedge fund that used artificial-intelligence models to deliver strong returns and attracted billions of dollars in capital.

Buoyed by profits and wary of Beijing’s tightening grip on speculative trading, Mr. Liang pivoted in 2023. He poured money into artificial intelligence, betting on A.I. chips and assembling a team to build China’s answer to the Silicon Valley front-runner OpenAI.

Now, just two years later, DeepSeek has upended the global tech landscape. How did he do it and what you need to know about Liang Wenfeng.?

He’s a deeply technical engineer. That puts him in a line of other successful Chinese tech executives.
When Chinese technologists debated why the country’s biggest investors and tech firms failed to anticipate the rise of generative A.I., many pointed to a single culprit: China’s companies were obsessed with quick returns in a fiercely competitive market.

Armed with those lessons — and backed by his own trading windfall — Mr. Liang has made it clear his ambitions lie far beyond commercial applications.

His focus, he has said, is on what he sees as China’s only real chance to catch up with the United States. That means taking bold, idealistic swings at fundamental A.I. challenges. His primary ambition is to create artificial general intelligence or A.G.I. — the elusive goal of building machines that can think and learn like humans.

When DeepSeek undercut its Chinese competition last year by offering its model at bargain prices, forcing larger rivals into their own price cuts, Mr. Liang dismissed the significance.