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Scant information exists about Liang Wenfeng, the DeepSeek founder whose launch of a cheaper and more accessible AI technology this week prompted a rout on Wall Street. But Wenfeng is not your average tech geek: he does not play with the Silicon bros.
He’s not been seen on a yacht with Jeff Bezos. He didn’t mingle with other billionaires at Anant Ambani’s nuptials, nor peacock on Donald Trump’s inauguration stage. He’s unlikely to be pictured in a spacesuit, talking of his dream to visit new frontiers. Google search returns an image of Wenfeng in front of DeepSeek branding, the model of a junior accountant with clipped goatee, glasses and pinstripe suit. The portrait has since been discredited as a stock picture from an image library: in real life, Wenfeng looks less self-assured.
The image most widely circulated places him in a meeting with Chinese Premier Li Qiang late last month. Forty years old, he looks so young as to appear callow, despite his pale grey suit and sweater vest. “When we first met him, he was this very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle talking about building a 10,000-chip cluster to train his own models. We didn’t take him seriously,” his former colleagues told the FT.
A former venture capitalist, he launched High-Flyer in 2015. The quantitative hedge fund was so successful that he managed assets worth more than $8bn. He founded DeepSeek in 2023 with a small team of predominantly Chinese talents, many of whom were picked up on graduation from the prestigious Peking University. He pays employees handsome salaries in order to recruit the best that he can.
By these accounts at least, Wenfeng stands in contrast to all that a modern tech bro represents: a “homegrown” talent from Guangdong, China, he’s a “tech idealist” (imagine?) who believes that “giving back is an honour” and who has created an open-source culture as a means to innovate.
Wenfeng provides an extraordinary counter-narrative to a script that has become almost vaudeville to those outside the bubble. In recent years the Silicon Valley culture has become so swollen on its success and privilege that its proponents now look like players in a pantomime.
Of course it’s not what you look like, but what you do that counts. But looking at Monday’s biggest financial losers from the fallout, you wonder if this strange parade of poseurs needed cutting down to size. Suddenly, Nvidia’s Jensen Huang, whose company endured a $589bn wipeout in market value on Monday, looks a bit foolish in his $9k Tom Ford lizard-effect coat. As does Sam Altman in his child-man sweatshirts. And Larry Ellison, Oracle’s own 80-year-old Peter Pan, with his deep-V sweaters and permatan.
The cult of personality that has grown around these men, the posturing, the self-branding . . . Could it be that we have reached peak tech bro? Perhaps it is no coincidence that many of the “winners” on Monday — Warren Buffett and Apple’s Tim Cook among them — are known for a more conservative deportment, the type of guys who wear a suit and tie. Off with the hoodies and funky medallions. In with the stiff collars and sober suits. Even Elon Musk, who spent the last six months slobbing around in a badly fitting T-shirt, has adopted a new tailored look.
“You are such fucking dopes,” says Logan Roy, the patriarch of Succession, when explaining his frustration with his children and the management of his holding company. “I love you. But you are not serious people.” They are words that have echoed all week as the markets scramble for safety following a period of wild ambition, risk and super-accelerated wealth. Bring back serious people: and not just in finance, in every sphere.
Of course, I would not be such a dope as to make my stock picks according to who does and does not wear a tie. But at least DeepSeek’s “Sputnik moment” returns an air of conservatism and introspection to a landscape so hyped on its own successes it thought itself invincible.
Already, the bros are pushing back. Thrive Capital’s Josh Kushner has been bad-mouthing the DeepSeek platform: Sam Altman’s fan-boy found time to tweet his reservations while stepping out in Paris during the couture shows with Karlie Kloss, his Dior-clad model wife. Kushner has become a totem of big-risk investments, a maverick investor prepared to invest huge amounts in start-ups in the hope of massive gains. Thrive contributed more than $1bn to the funding round that gave OpenAI a $150bn valuation, so one can probably read his X proclamation as little more than sour grapes.
Communists versus capitalists, suits versus exotic leathers, open source versus IP: the DeepSeek story disrupts the Silicon mythology. I find it all delightfully entertaining, but then I’ve got no skin in this particular game. Wenfeng has unsettled the trajectory from underneath a brilliantly (and possibly, self-barbered) feathered fringe. His only slightly alpha peccadillo? He likes exploring deep-sea caves.
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