This interview with DeepSeek founder and CEO Liang Wenfeng, also co-founder of the hedge fund …

Impressive, honestly. They're trying to become a mecca for innovation and research, trying to lead rather than follow, build a culture where innovation can spark future economic advantages, whereas OpenAI seem to more about monetisation currently, many of their researchers and scientists now departed. Under the aegis of a dictatorship they may be, but this encourages me more than anything OpenAI have said in a while.

to me, just that these lines from DeepSeek founder/CEO Liang Wenfeng gives a clue that China communist party involvement in DeepSeek-R1 is minimal or nothing. If CCP is involved in a big way, we won't see these words from CEO. > "For many years, Chinese companies are used to others doing technological innovation, while we focused on application monetization..." > “But in fact, this is something that has been created through the tireless efforts of generations of Western-led tech communities. It’s just because we weren’t previously involved in this process that we’ve ignored its existence.”

Another great interview dug up from 2020 but translated today. https://www.pekingnology.com/p/ceo-of-deepseeks-parent-high-... Interesting tidbit: >So far, there are perhaps only two first-person accounts from DeepSeek, in two separate interviews given by the company’s founder. I knew DeepSeek was lowkey but I didn't expect this much stealthmode. They were likely off CCP boomer radar until last week when Liang met with PRC premiere after R1 exploded. Finance quants turned AI powerhouse validates CCP strategy to crush finance compensation to redirect top talent to strategic soft/hardware. I assume they're going to get a lot more state support now, especially if US decides to entity list DeepSeek for succeeding / making the market bleed.

It's a good long term strategy. Releasing step A you developed, so you can see where others can go with it and adjusting your process of development of step B and C accordingly. Complete opposite of what OpenAI is doing, basically trying to squeeze step A short-term before others catch up and trying to develop step B with only limited experience you can gather yourself, in-house, from step A.

I think it's has escaped most of the HN crowds that Liang Wenfeng has a solid background (bachelor and master) in Electronics and Information Engineering that encompassed hardware and software. It's really a shame that in the current world, the art of hardware is dying out, where hardware people are not properly compensated and appreciated [1]. Liang Wenfeng belongs to this breed of engineers with hybrid hardware and software background that have money and at the same time founding and leading and companies (similar to two Steves of Apple), they're a force to reckon with with even with severe limitations, in case of Chinese companies computing resources sanctions CPU/RAM/GPU/FPGA/etc. But unlike two Steves these new hybrid engineers that raised in Linux era are the big believers of open source, as Google rightly predicted in case of LLM none of the proprietary LLM solutions has the moat …

All of this resonates deeply with me. There are a lot of memes running around about Silicon Valley's Jing Yang (sorry if it's misspelled) eating OpenAI's lunch, but as much as those are funny, the underlying open source innovation and how it aligns with a vision of values, realisation, and also inevitability that eventually someone else would be able to reach these things, too - that all strikes a chord I have to say.

It doesn't surprise me that someone who has this thinking style is also able to outperform those who do not in certain domains.

It's a breath of fresh air how grounded and coherent Wenfeg's argument is as a CEO of an AI startup. He actually talks like someone technical and not a snake oil salesman. Compare this to the interviews of Altman or Musk, talking vaguely about elevating the level consciousness, saving humanity from existential threats, understand the nature of the universe and other such nonsense they pander to investors.