DeepSeek Founder Hailed In China As 'Genius' After US Market Rout

As US tech stocks roiled on Monday from the hype about Chinese startup DeepSeek, the company's founder is being lauded as a hero back home. Hedge fund manager Liang Wenfeng, who started the artificial intelligence firm as a side project in 2023, went viral on Chinese social media on Tuesday largely because of the rout.DeepSeek's cost-effectiveness was already making waves in the tech industry over the last two weeks, but it was the latest market reaction that pushed Liang into internet stardom in China.DeepSeek's story is now that of a Chinese startup — which says it spent $6 million building a large language model rival to ChatGPT — shocking investors and AI scientists so much that US stocks like Nvidia lost a collective $1 trillion in on-paper value within a day.In a bout of national pride, viral threads on Weibo, China's version of X, regularly referenced Liang's hometown of Zhanjiang in Guangdong province. "DeepSeek is a megahit: internet users buzz about three AI heroes of Guangdong," said one top thread with 18 million views, as of Tuesday morning Beijing time.Liang was listed as one of those "heroes," alongside Moonshot AI's founder, Yang Zhilin, and the AI scientist He Kaiming, who is an author of one of the most-cited papers on machine learning.Notably, China's social media is heavily moderated, making it difficult to determine the full scope of discussion on any given topic. However, that can also provide insight into the rhetoric and topics that are encouraged or permitted in its online spaces.More on Liang Wenfeng’s AI stardom on Business InsiderPlease visit our sponsor Moving On IT | Tomorrow’s Technology, Today | Thank You Get full access to Neural News Network at remunerationlabs.substack.com/subscribe