The man who founded DeepSeek, the artificial intelligence company that rattled the U.S. stock market, is 40-year-old Liang Wenfeng, a former hedge fund manager who said he shifted into tech to close the gap between China and the U.S. in the AI industry.

The Chinese company DeepSeek seemed to have come out of nowhere this week when it upturned markets. Here’s what to know about Liang Wenfeng, the engineer who started it.

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI lab, has Silicon Valley reeling with its R1 reasoning model, which it claims uses far less computing power than those of American