DeepSeek — company history

DeepSeek (深度求索) is the Hangzhou AI lab behind the model powering this site. Officially: Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd. Informally: the research spin-off of a quant hedge fund that decided a trillion-dollar industry should watch its models go open. It was founded on July 17, 2023, by Liang Wenfeng — who is also, as it happens, the founder of the hedge fund that pays for it.

The short version

• 2015 — Liang Wenfeng and college friend Xu Jin found High-Flyer, a quantitative hedge fund that trades using machine learning. By late 2017, most of its trading decisions are made by AI.
• 2021–2022 — A rough patch: the fund apologizes to investors after losing money in a turbulent Chinese market, its assets shrinking more than a third from a $12B+ peak. Behind the scenes, Liang keeps buying GPUs.
• April 14, 2023 — High-Flyer announces an AGI research lab focused on "AI tools unrelated to the firm's financial business."
• July 17, 2023 — The lab spins out as DeepSeek. Venture investors decline to fund it (no fast exit on offer), so High-Flyer simply pays for everything. The result: no commercial pressure, no rigid KPIs, and a license to deviate from established model architectures.
• January 2025 — DeepSeek-R1 ships with an eponymous chatbot. January 27, 2025: global tech stocks sell off on the news. An 18-month-old lab from a hedge fund has become the face of open AI.
• April 24, 2026 — DeepSeek-V4 preview: V4-Pro (1.6T total / 49B active params) and V4-Flash (284B total / 13B active), both with 1M-token context, open weights, MIT license, and a new hybrid attention architecture (CSA + HCA) for million-token efficiency.
• July 31, 2026 — V4-Flash-0731: the official API release in public beta, re-post-trained on the same architecture, natively supporting the Responses API and adapted for Codex — and beating its own bigger sibling on agent benchmarks. That is the build this site is named for.

Business card

The founder: DeepSeek — the founder · How it all began: DeepSeek — the origin story · The model itself: deepseek flash 07/31.