Exclusive Interview with DeepSeek's Founder

In an exclusive interview, DeepSeek’s founder Liang Wenfeng discusses the company’s disruptive impact on the AI industry, its unexpected role in sparking a fierce price war, and its ambitious pursuit of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Following the release of DeepSeek V2, competitors like ByteDance, Alibaba, and Tencentrapidly slashed their prices to match, but the founder insists this was not a deliberate strategy. Instead, DeepSeek’s cost-efficient architecture allowed them to lower prices while maintaining profitability, unlike rivals who engaged in loss-leading tactics to compete.

DeepSeek takes a fundamentally different approach from other Chinese AI companies, which often adopt Meta’sLLaMA-based models for quick commercialization. The company believes that genuine innovation—particularly in data construction, human-like AI behavior, and training efficiency—is necessary for AGI. The founder argues that China’s AI industry is still trapped in an imitation mindset, while U.S. firms like NVIDIA benefit from strong tech ecosystems and long-term roadmaps. DeepSeek aims to break this cycle by prioritizing original research over short-term profits.

Unlike many AI startups, DeepSeek fosters a bottom-up, passion-driven culture. Employees enjoy unrestricted access to training resources, and project leadership develops organically. The company also disputes the closed-source model adopted by OpenAI andMistral, believing that genuine competitive advantage stems from nurturing an open technical ecosystem.

Looking ahead, DeepSeek is focused on next-gen AI architectures, particularly in math/code reasoning, multimodal interaction, and natural language understanding. The founder remains optimistic that as China shifts toward deep innovation, its AI industry will evolve beyond mere commercialization to global leadership.

Source: XYZ Labs

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