Chinese Quant Whiz Built DeepSeek In The Shadow Of a Hedge Fund Rout
- Liang Wenfeng’s hedge fund firm had early success with AI
- DeepSeek’s breakthrough wiped out $1 trillion in market value
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Three years ago, Liang Wenfeng’s quantitative hedge fund firm apologized profusely to investors for losing money during a tumultuous period for China’s stock market.
It was a surprising stumble for Zhejiang High-Flyer Asset Management, which used artificial intelligence to pick stocks and had grown rapidly to become one of the country’s largest quant funds. As the firm navigated through that crisis and its assets shrunk by more than a third from a peak of more than $12 billion, behind the scenes Liang was laying the groundwork for a new AI startup, DeepSeek.