Chinese AI firm DeepSeek made global headlines in January when it released its low-cost AI model, R1, developed at a fraction of the cost of rivals like OpenAI’s GPT. The company’s founder, Liang Wenfeng, 40, entered China’s 100 richest list for the first time with a fortune of $11.5 billion, largely based on his stake in DeepSeek, which Forbes values at $15 billion.
Unlike OpenAI, DeepSeek has largely avoided external investors, being funded primarily by Liang’s quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, which he founded a decade ago. Analysts estimate DeepSeek could be worth 5–10% of OpenAI’s $300 billion valuation from its March funding round. While OpenAI launched its GPT-5 model in August, DeepSeek has only released incremental updates, and its commercialization remains modest compared with OpenAI’s reported $12 billion in annualized revenue.
In China, AI chatbots are mostly offered for free. DeepSeek’s app had over 73 million active users in September. The company charges business developers a modest $0.03 per million tokens, compared with OpenAI’s $0.125 per million tokens for GPT-5.
Liang has said his primary goal is innovation rather than immediate financial gain. The son of a primary school teacher, he studied computer vision at Zhejiang University, graduating with a master’s degree in information and communication engineering in 2010. He founded High-Flyer, which now manages around $8 billion in assets using proprietary AI algorithms.
DeepSeek has gained attention for its efficiency: a September paper in Nature detailed that one of its AI models was trained for just $294,000, compared with $500 million reportedly spent by OpenAI on a six-month GPT-5 run. However, the total hardware costs over the years, including Nvidia chips, are estimated at $1.6 billion. With U.S. semiconductor export restrictions, DeepSeek has sourced chips from Chinese telecom giant Huawei.
Domestically, DeepSeek faces strong competition, especially from Alibaba, which is investing over $50 billion in AI over the next three years. Analysts say developers are starting to adopt Alibaba’s Qwen models, which may rival or surpass DeepSeek’s offerings. The world now waits to see DeepSeek’s next moves.
