Deepseek's Liang Wenfeng hires graduates over "AI Wizards"
AI research staff are in high demand at hedge funds but hiring from major players like OpenAI can be very expensive. Liang Wenfeng, founder of Chinese quant fund High-Flyer, has taken a different approach to AI hiring. It seems to be paying off in a big way.
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DeepSeek is funded by the success of High-Flyer, which has been up 13% on average since its inception in 2015. Wenfeng's startup DeepSeek has an open-source AI model, released last week, that can outperform models released by the likes of OpenAI. It does so at a fraction of the cost, with a fraction of the chips, and its staff have a fraction of the experience you'll find at other teams.
In an interview late last year, Wenfeng disputed claims that DeepSeek was hiring AI "wizards". He said the startup consisted of "mostly fresh graduates from top universities, PhD candidates in their fourth or fifth year, and some young people who graduated just a few years ago."
DeepSeek likes to hire from Peking University, which is ranked 14th globally overall in QS' university rankings. Peking graduate hires at DeepSeek include Xiaokang Chen, a computer vision specialist, ex-Microsoft intern and 2024 PhD graduate. A DeepSeek core systems engineer Yixuan Tan is a 2024 undergraduate who joined in December 2023. DeepSeek infrastructure developer Shangyan Zhou is a 2020 Peking graduate, but spent three years at Wenfeng's hedge fund High-Flyer before joining.
DeepSeek is not exclusively hiring from Chinese universities. The startup's most recent hire, Wanto Gunawan, has a masters in mechatronic robotics from the University of Melbourne, and joined last week from AI startup Prosa.
Hiring graduates is a cheap option. At top US tech firms salaries for senior AI talent reach $650k for members of technical staff according to the H1B Visa salary database.
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