DeepSeek R1 Release

Liang Wenfeng — founder profiled in the Chinese Founder Ledger — is documented as follows: zhejiang University-trained engineer who co-founded quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer, built large-scale computing infrastructure that later supported AI research, and founded AI company DeepSeek in July 2023, which gained international attention with the January 2025 release of DeepSeek-R1. The profile is grounded in the 3 sources indexed for this founder.

Released the DeepSeek-R1 model and chatbot in January 2025 under open-weight licensing, and per the July 2026 Yicai-reported investor meeting, committed to keeping the company's most advanced future models open-source rather than maximizing near-term profit.

DeepSeek's R1 release was described as 'upending AI' due to its comparatively low training cost and compute usage relative to established Western rivals, and was noted as geopolitically significant given ongoing US semiconductor trade restrictions on China.

Liang Wenfeng's DeepSeek initializing from the V3 model and sharing the V3 architecture, DeepSeek was planning to release its first chatbot application, the DeepSeek-R1 .

DeepSeek's January 2025 release of the DeepSeek-R1 model drew international attention for demonstrating performance comparable to OpenAI's GPT-4 and o1 while reportedly using significantly lower training costs (the company claims about $6 million to train its V3 model, versus OpenAI's reported ~$100 million for GPT-4) and roughly one-tenth the compute of Meta's comparable Llama 3.1 model.

Liang Wenfeng's DeepSeek deepSeek's January 2025 release of R1 disrupted prevailing assumptions about the cost of frontier capability, and its April 2026 V4 release .