The 'Chinese Hero' Who Created Dipsick Competing With ChatGPT - Laxman Baral Blog
The 'Chinese Hero' Who Created Dipsick Competing With ChatGPTThe 'Chinese Hero' Who Created Dipsick Competing With ChatGPT

The ‘Chinese Hero’ Who Created Dipsick Competing With ChatGPT  The US has brought a new storm to the world of artificial intelligence (AI) with ChatGPT. At that time, the question of how it will affect China, America’s biggest competitor in the technology world, was also raised.

Two years after the rise of ChatGPT, the emergence of China’s AI model has once again raised another question among people – “Can the US stop China from inventing new things?”

It has given its answer by creating a ‘better’ AI than ChatGPT, which is not available for use in China.

It is not that giant technology companies like Baidu in China have not created chatbots before. But some people ridiculed it because it was not good enough. Then Tencent and ByteDance also launched chatbots. However, those companies could not stand up to ChatGPT because they could not create good chatbots.

However, when the Chinese company released DeepSick AI, it caused a stir all over the world, from Silicon Valley, where big companies are based in the US. Because its manufacturing company claims that DeepSick has been developed to compete with other chatbots by spending billions of dollars less than the American company.

Currently, the founder of DeepSick is being discussed on Chinese social media as an ‘AI hero’, which has made it to the top of the list of most popular apps on Apple’s App Store in the US within a few days of its launch.

With DeepSec’s sudden rise and popularity in the AI ​​world, Liang Wenfeng is being hailed by some as the Chinese version of OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman.

How was DeepSec born?

Liang Wenfeng, 40, has a partial investment in the Chinese AI company DeepSec. It is a startup company founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China.

Liang grew up in Guangdong, China in the 1980s. His father was a primary school teacher, as he explained in a 2024 interview. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in artificial intelligence from Zhejiang University, one of the oldest and most prestigious educational institutions in China.

In 2015, Liang, along with two other friends who studied at Zhejiang University, founded Hi-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund that relied on mathematics and AI for its investments. Their hedge fund grew rapidly in China, reaching a value of 100 billion yuan (about 190.7 billion rupees). By 2021, this had fallen to 8 billion yuan (152 billion rupees). However, it has become the most important hedge fund in China.

Liang said he didn’t go looking for experienced engineers to build a team. Instead, he reached out to PhD students from top Chinese universities like Peking University and Tsinghua. The students published their research in prestigious journals and won awards at international academic conferences. But they had little experience working in a company.

Chinese media reported that DeepSik’s team consists of fewer than 140 people. The team, which includes those from Chinese universities, is proudly declared by internet users as “homegrown talent.”

Liang had begun buying thousands of Nvidia graphics processors as an AI side project in 2021 before the Joe Biden administration banned AI chip exports to China.

According to Reuters, Hi-Flyer’s AI unit said it had a cluster of 10,000 A100 chips in operation in 2022.

In an interview with Waves in July 2024, Liang said Chinese companies have been accustomed to developing advanced technologies for years, which he argued were unsustainable in other countries. ​“This time, our goal is not to make quick profits, but to push the technological frontier to develop the ecosystem,” he said.

According to the Financial Times, DeepSik is known for paying the highest salaries to its AI engineers, who are based in offices in Hangzhou and Beijing.

China’s top leadership has also taken notice of DeepSik. Before the release of the DeepSik-R1 model on January 20, Liang attended a closed-door meeting with industry executives and others hosted by Chinese Premier Li Keqiang, Chinese state media reported.

Liang has run DeepSik as a bottom-up company. He has been running the company without taking any special role in it. Speaking on the same topic, he said, “I believe that innovation is first and foremost a matter of trust. Why do new innovations always come out in Silicon Valley? Because they dare to try. When ChatGPT came, China was not yet in a position to trust research. From investors to large tech firms, many found a huge gap in research. Instead, they focused more on making applications. But innovation requires confidence, which is more common among young people.”

“Deepsea R-1 could be the moment where it reaches new heights,” venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, a close adviser to US President Donald Trump, told AFP. “It’s one of the most amazing and impressive successes I’ve ever seen.”

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