DeepSeek's founder is being hailed in China as an 'AI hero of Guangdong' after the US market rout
- China's internet is enamored with Liang Wenfeng after his company, DeepSeek, caused a stir in the US with its AI.
- His sudden rise to fame has largely been facilitated by a subsequent market downturn in the US.
- Local media outlets are now referring to Liang as a "genius," an "AI hero of Guangdong," and a "great god."
US tech stocks struggled on Monday due to the commotion caused by the Chinese startup DeepSeek, meanwhile, its founder is being hailed as a hero in their country of origin.
One developer who set up an artificial intelligence firm as a side project in 2023 gained significant attention on Chinese social media on Tuesday mainly due to the rout.
The cost-effectiveness of Cheng Liang's latest project was already generating buzz in the tech industry over the last two weeks, but it was the recent market reaction that catapulted Liang to internet fame in China.
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In a burst of national patriotism, viral threads on Weibo, China's equivalent of Twitter, frequently mentioned Liang's hometown of Zhanjiang in Guangdong province.
"DeepSeek has been making huge waves: internet users rave about three AI personalities from Guangdong, as of this morning with 18 million views," said one of the top threads.
Liang was listed as one of those "heroes" along with Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin and AI scientist He Kaiming, who is the author of one of the most frequently cited papers on machine learning.
Notably, social media in China is heavily monitored and controlled, making it difficult to gauge the full extent of online discussion on any particular issue. However, this level of moderation can also give insight into the rhetoric and topics that are encouraged or tolerated within its online environments.
Another major chat on Weibo, with over 52 million views, hinted at Liang's return to his hometown ahead of the Lunar New Year, which starts on Wednesday. A Guangdong-based newspaper reported by the Yangcheng Evening News referred to Liang as a "genius" and a "great god with international recognition."
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"The country must protect him, seriously," said a well-known Shanghai-based blogger with 2.2 million followers.
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featuring him as Xi's chief operating officer in its 100 Most Influential People list for 2024.
The presence of the DeepSeek founder at the symposium attracted more online attention due to Liang's age: The 40-year-old was filmed sitting with a group of men who appeared noticeably older than him.
Why the young people born after 1985 from Zhanjiang are making waves globally," one viral thread noted. Generations in China are commonly known as "post-1990" or "post-1980," as opposed to "millennials" or "Generation Z.
Liang, who grew up in the 1980s in Guangdong, and his company made headlines earlier this month by releasing their flagship AI model, R1, which experts claim has a level of sophistication rivaling that of ChatGPT.
DeepSeek said it used only 2,000 Nvidia H800 chips to train R1, meaning it spent about $6 million — a cost dwarfed by the billions invested into AI by US tech giants.
on Apple's list of the Most Downloaded Free Apps.
DeepSeek and Liang's quant hedge fund, High Flyer, did not comment on requests for information sent by Business Insider.
on Microsoft Start.
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