Founder of DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup. He studied at Zhejiang University, which ranked fourth in the 2025 Nature Index of research institutions. Mr Liang has made developing artificial general intelligence (AGI) his firm's mission and reckons it may arrive in as little as two years. His exploits in building a model nearly matching OpenAI's flagship at a fraction of the computing cost won him a meeting with Li Qiang, China's prime minister, in early 2025. Xi Jinping's televised handshake with him, broadcast into the country's living rooms, helped transform how ordinary Chinese view AI.
People have believed for hundreds of years that newts in a well mean that the water's fresh and drinkable, and *in all that time* never asked themselves whether the newts got out to go to the lavatory.