DeepSeek (and before it became DeepSeek)

DeepSeek is the Chinese large language model (LLM) that stunned the AI world with its low training costs and open-weight approach. This episode dives into the extraordinary founder story of Liang Wenfeng, the secretive quant trader who pivoted his billion-dollar firm, High-Flyer Capital, into a top AI competitor.How did a quantitative finance empire become the birthplace of DeepSeek R1 and V3? We unpack the innovations, the GPU hoarding strategy, the DeepSeek architecture, and the controversial pivot that positions them as a serious challenger to ChatGPT and Llama in the global AGI race.👉 Subscribe & Follow: ASCENT Podcast on Substack📖 Episode Chapters00:00:00 Intro00:04:23 Liang Wenfeng's early life and education00:08:16 Inception of the quant trading journey00:18:47 Becoming quant king: building a billion-bollar empire00:31:00 The hoarding (of GPUs) begins00:39:53 Liang Wenfeng's vision for China's quant future00:46:48 The 2021 challenge and fund drawdown00:50:29 The pivot: from trading to AGI00:57:17 Innovation under constraint01:08:31 DeepSeek's unconventional hiring philosophy01:12:35 Future uncertain: can DeepSeek outlast the giants?01:20:50 Ascent with open sourceCorrection: at 59:24 - it should be 600 billion not 6 billion parametersP.S. Yes, these show notes were also generated by DeepSeek!