Who is DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, the math whiz-hedge fund manager upending the AI industry?

Liang Wenfeng has gone from boyish, bespectacled math whiz to global tech figure overnight thanks to DeepSeek’s explosive impact on the artificial intelligence industry.The millennial math nerd – who reportedly wore a sweater vest, suit jacket and no tie to a meeting with the Chinese premier last week – is behind DeepSeek, the Chinese AI startup that shook the global sector with claims it developed an advanced model in just a few months at a fraction of the cost of US rivals.Liang, called China’s Sam Altman, didn’t start as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, but rather a math geek who launched his own hedge fund just a few years after graduating from college.Born in 1985 and raised in Zhanjiang, China, Liang was a straight-A student who studied calculus and wrote AI algorithms in his free time, according to The Wall Street Journal.A few years after graduating from the prestigious Zhejiang University, he launched his own quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, with two computer scientist pals, the report said.The fund used an artificial intelligence algorithm to pick stocks – and today manages some $8 billion, making it one of China’s largest quant funds, according to the Journal.It has not all been smooth sailing, though, issuing a public apology to its investors in 2021 for underperforming benchmark indexes.He was deeply inspired by Jim Simons, the chain-smoking quant genius behind the Long Island firm Renaissance Technologies located some 8,000 miles away – even penning the introduction to a Chinese version of a Simons biography.“Whenever I encounter difficulties at work, I recall Simons’s words: ‘There must be a way to model prices,’” Liang wrote in his introduction to Simons’ biography.Over the past five years, at least five funds managed by High-Flyer have produced average excess returns of more than 20% compared to market benchmarks, according to financial data provider Simu Paipaiwang.In 2021, just before the Biden administration started...