The mysterious DeepSeek founder has been spotted in public for the first time since the company wiped a whopping $1 trillion off stocks.
The founder of the AI company was spotted at a conference in Beijing, China, after he didn’t turn up to last week’s global AI summit in Paris, France.
Liang Wenfeng is the head of the AI tech firm that upended the industry, giving the US some competition in the field.
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This is because the model run by DeepSeek is a lot cheaper to operate than OpenAI’s ChatGPT and it caused the stock market to drop by over $1 trillion.
OpenAI co-founder Sam Altman responded to the drop on social media.
Posting on X, formerly Twitter, he wrote: “DeepSeek’s R1 is an impressive model, particularly around what they’re able to deliver for the price. We will obviously deliver much better models and also it’s legit invigorating to have a new competitor! We will pull up some releases.”
DeepSeek is powered by the open source DeepSeek-V3 model, with claims it was trained for around $6 million, a fraction the cost of its US counterparts.
President Donald Trump has declared that this should be a ‘wakeup call’ for the American AI industry, arguing that they should now be ‘laser-focused on competing to win’ in light of DeepSeek’s almost revolutionary developments.
Trump recently gathered the likes of Altman’s OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle to launch his $500 billion Stargate project that is focused on the advancement of AI.
The project, where the group intends to build data centers, is expected to ‘instantly’ create 100,000 American jobs and could even create personalized cancer vaccinations in the future.
Following his post, Altman went on to say that OpenAI is ‘excited to continue to execute on our research roadmap and believe more compute is more important now than ever before to succeed at our mission,’ offering almost an inverse of what DeepSeek’s low-budget approach strives for.
Alman also reiterated his goal for achieving artificial general intelligence, outlining that he ‘look[s] forward to bringing you all AGI and beyond’.
Many people in the replies were more concerned about the short-term though, expressing that Altman has been ‘deepseeked’ after the AI bubble has supposedly popped.
One user wrote: “How about open sourcing your models.”
Meanwhile, another said they were ‘looking forward to a monthly subscription price reduce’.
It looks like there could soon be a AI advancement race.