Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) firm DeepSeek has stunned the tech industry with the launch of highly efficient AI models, rivalling advanced products from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic. A major factor behind its success is the team of "young geniuses" driving it forward, including 29-year-old researcher, Luo Fuli, hailed as an "AI prodigy" by Chinese media, according to the South China Morning Post.
Who Is Luo Fuli? 29-Year-Old AI Researcher Behind DeepSeek Growth
Luo was not born in a rich family, but this did not stop her from striving for excellence. She earned a seat at Beijing Normal University, where she excelled in computer science after initial hiccups. She also studied at Peking University's Institute of Computational Linguistics, where she presented eight papers at the ACL conference in 2019.
Her achievement at this prestigious conference caught the attention of mega-tech giants Alibaba and Xiaomi, making way for her future achievements. She was a researcher at Alibaba's DAMO Academy where she led the multilingual pre-training model VECO and worked for the AliceMind project.
Luo Fuli joined DeepSeek in 2022, bringing her expertise in natural language processing, which was crucial in developing DeepSeek-V2. At the time, DeepSeek was a quantitative hedge fund focused on using mathematical algorithms for trading.
Following the success of this project, Luo's work caught the attention of Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, who offered her a salary of 10 million yuan ($1.4 million), according to the South China Morning Post.
In 2024, Fuli published a paper with several others which gave access to DeepSeek open-source codes to help the research on the subject.
The DeepSeek team consists of college graduates, freshers and people with little work experience along with 150 Chinese researchers and engineers along with 31 data automation researchers, according to the South China Morning Post. DeepSeek's AI assistant became the number 1 downloaded free app on Apple's iPhone store on its launch and made Wall Street tech superstars' stocks tumble. Observers are eager to see whether the Chinese company has matched America's leading AI companies at a fraction of the cost.
Enthusiasts have taken to social media to show the surface-level difference between Deepsake and ChatGPT. Even Microsoft founder Satya Nadella could not notice this success. According to him, increased efficiency in AI technology, similar to DeepSeek's would help other AI businesses too.
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