When Liang Wenfeng returned home at the end of January to celebrate the Chinese New Year with his family, he was welcomed as a national hero. "Welcome. You are the pride of your hometown," read one of the signs that could be seen on a huge inflatable gate, like those of children's castles, decorated with red lanterns and placed at the entrance of Mililing, a small village in southern China.
Neighbors say that during the holidays, Mililing became a tourist attraction because many curious people from other parts of the country, upon learning from local media that Liang had traveled to his village, traveled there to try to meet the father of DeepSeek, the fashionable artificial intelligence assistant in China.
The holidays ended on Wednesday, and the Chinese have returned to work. So have the employees of DeepSeek, the company that shares its name with the AI and is based in the city of Hangzhou, in the southeast, and also has an office in Beijing. The first is located in a skyscraper surrounded by financial companies.
Liang's tech company had kept a low profile, not even the other companies in the same building knew exactly what DeepSeek was doing until it broke into the tech market with its low-cost chatbot and powerful reasoning model, surpassing the popular ChatGPT from Open AI, and published it as open-source.
Since DeepSeek's headquarters opened its doors after the holidays, many young Chinese, mostly engineers and programmers, have shown up at the headquarters hoping to find work at the current startup in the Asian giant.
The entrance to the Hangzhou skyscraper where Liang's company and the parent company, High-Flyer Quant, are located has been much busier in the last few hours because the tech company has announced that it is starting to recruit young AI talents.
A post on the High-Flyer Quant website stated that DeepSeek has opened positions for dozens of jobs related to research and development in general artificial intelligence (AGI), software that develops self-learning capabilities without the need to train the chatbot.
As highlighted by Chinese media, for the position of "deep learning researcher in AGI" a salary of 100,000 yuan per month (13,700$) is offered. Workers with technical degrees and articles published in "world-class journals" can apply for this job, without the need for previous work experience.
"Our team is mainly made up of recent graduates and workers with just one or two years of work experience," Liang said in an interview last December after launching his AI models, DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1, which were available in app stores on January 20. Liang had claimed that the performance of his chatbot was at the same level, or even superior, to ChatGPT in complex tasks such as mathematics, coding, and natural language reasoning.
No one believed him until Silicon Valley began testing the R1 with math problems that it solved much faster than ChatGPT. The surprise was even greater in the technology hub when DeepSeek claimed that the application had cost only 5.58 million dollars, hundreds of millions less than its American counterparts, and had been developed without relying on high-performance chips, which were believed to be essential for launching such advanced models.
For another job offer at DeepSeek, aimed at "engineers in deep learning systems," the average annual salary is around one million yuan, which is approximately 137,000$ at the exchange rate.
Chinese media have reported that to develop DeepSeek, Liang (40 years old) sought out the best young talents who excelled in Chinese programming and electronic engineering schools, and also recruited national experts who were working abroad, especially in American tech institutions.
After the unexpected success of DeepSeek, with millions of downloads worldwide, several countries have scrutinized the Chinese chatbot. Australia, following the advice of security agencies, has been the first to ban its use on all government devices. The same measure has been announced on Thursday by the Ministries of Defense and Trade of South Korea.
In India, the Ministry of Finance has advised officials not to use DeepSeek because, as they previously said about ChatGPT, it "poses risks to the confidentiality of government data and documents." In Europe, countries like France and Italy have requested information from the Chinese company on how it uses information about users.