It took a while for Silicon Valley to comprehend exactly what Liang Wenfeng had achieved. But soon markets were reeling, U.S. tech dominance was being openly questioned, and Liang had been propelled to global renown. By crunching data in a more efficient manner, Liang’s obscure AI startup DeepSeek released a generative AI platform in January that was comparable to OpenAI’s ChatGPT while using just a fraction of the bleeding-edge chips produced by Nvidia, which itself quickly lost $600 billion in market value, the largest drop for a single company in U.S. stock-market history. Meanwhile, the buzz around DeepSeek’s low-cost AI helped add billions to the value of tech stocks in China and Hong Kong. By February, DeepSeek had surpassed ChatGPT to become the No. 1 free app on Apple’s U.S. app store, and Liang, who grew up in a tiny village in China’s southern province of Guangdong and studied computer science at Zhejiang University, was among the Chinese tech titans invited to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping. “We’re not looking to make a quick profit,” Liang, 40, told Chinese media. “We want to get out in front of the technology and help drive the entire ecosystem forward.”
Campbell is a TIME editor-at-large