Lyang Wenfng, 39 -year -old founder of Chinese artificial intelligence Deepseek who caused chaos in technological markets internationally on Monday, is the new one ‘National Hero’ of China. It is considered that the country’s hope will overcome the growing obstacles that the United States puts through the export controls of technology products, in its attempt to claim a leading role – if not leading – in the era of artificial intelligence.

The “jerk with the awful haircut that didn’t matter to him,” as the Daily Mail describes, was almost an unknown person until recently, as he maintained a low profile and systematically avoided the spotlight. But that changed overnight on January 20, as since then the “jerk” was found to be sitting at the same table as the country’s political elite and concern the headlines of technology media worldwide.

On that day, Liang was called, along with 8 other people, to speak in a closed -door symposium organized by China Prime Minister Lee Chiang about Beijing’s policy in technology.

There, Lyang noted that China cannot constantly follow the West in technological discoveries and limited to the development of technologies it receives from abroad, but must lead. He even argued that Chinese innovation has the opportunity to overthrow the new world -class intelligence class shaped by US technological giants, urging the Chinese government to focus on cutting -edge technologies.

A speech that can not be considered symptomatic, as the same day was the swearing -in of US President Donald Trump, who has proclaimed US sovereignty in the field of artificial intelligence.

Beijing apparently chose deliberately on that day for Lyang’s speech, as on that day his company, Deepseek, gave a sample of writing its potential in America, launching the US artificial intelligence model R1 on the American market.

A Ai model that has attracted the interest of the global technological community lightly, not only because it is considered extremely competitive, perhaps even better, than the corresponding AI models of Western technology giants, but also because it is much more economical.

The Chinese company claims that it took only two months to develop it, while Its cost did not exceed $ 6 million As less advanced – and much cheaper – Nvidia chips were used.

This news, coupled with R1’s first ratings, caused cracks in the US narrative of US hegemony in the field of artificial intelligence.

A fact that caused a sell-off in technology shares worldwide, exhausting more than $ 1 trillion. Capitalization dollars of technology giants, with the strongest blow being the title of the American Nvidia semiconductor giant, which saw its capitalization on Monday, shrink by nearly $ 600 billion in just one day.

‘Communist AI’

Although it is still too early to confirm – or no – the superiority of Deepseek’s AI model over Western AI models and not all information about the time and the cost of developing it, the sham that caused and the origin of Deepseek triggered Already the first reactions.

China’s “hawks” have characterized it ‘Communist artificial intelligence’While many Western officials have expressed their concern about the influence of Beijing in the company and the possibility of using Chatbot to “feed” its users in the West with … Chinese propaganda and misinformation.

They mentioned, for example, in the case of Taiwan, which is largely a potential ignition of a future world war, for which Deepseek’s chatbot says it is a “inalienable part of China”, aligning Beijing’s claims.

By the hedge fund in Ai

The founder of Deepseek, although he became widely known as the man who seems to change the data in the field of artificial intelligence, did not start his career in the field of IT.

As he himself revealed in Chinese media media, he worked as Hedge fund manager Before deciding to turn to technology, aiming to alleviate the divide that separates China from the US into the artificial intelligence industry.

In an interview with Waves, Lyang said he grew up in Guangdong province in China in the 1980s, where his parents worked as elementary teachers, and according to his teachers early on he showed that he had talent in mathematics.

According to Chinese media, Liang studied information and communication mechanics at the University of Zhejiang, Hangtzu, a technological hub in eastern China, including the seat of the Chinese e -commerce giant Alibaba Group.

In 2015, he founded High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund that uses mathematical and artificial intelligence models for investment strategies. By 2017, High-Flyer, which today serves more than 10,000 large wealth customers, had created its own artificial intelligence team and used almost entirely algorithms for its transactions, according to its site.

In 2021, shortly before Joe Biden’s government limits semiconductor exports to China, the founder of Deepseek seems to have already designed his next steps as he began buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processors for a project he did not reveal then, according to the Financial Times.

Two years later, however, in 2023, he founded Deepseek, which based its growth in maximizing the efficiency of the processors available in China, as it was no longer set to buy Nvidia semiconductors.

Reportedly Deepseek’s initial chapter was just $ 1.4 million.