The *Financial Times* reported that Liang Wenfeng, the founder of the AI startup DeepSeek, is now celebrated in China as a national digital hero. His company has managed to compete with major U.S. tech giants despite limited resources, including a relatively small number of AI chips and a compact engineering team.

Through his startup, Liang has successfully published research indicating the possibility of building large language models using far fewer advanced AI chips from Nvidia compared to the development of models by U.S. companies. This led to a $600 billion drop in Nvidia's market value in record time, as investors questioned the necessity of spending hundreds of billions on massive AI computing centers in light of DeepSeek's achievements.

The *Financial Times* noted that Liang spent the Lunar New Year holiday in his hometown of Meililing in Guangdong Province, where he was warmly welcomed amid tight security measures. The village, which had never been mentioned online before, raised celebratory banners with phrases like, "Liang Wenfeng returns to his hometown to spread success and contribute to rural revitalization."

His family home has become an unexpected pilgrimage site for those curious about the birthplace of the man who has unsettled major U.S. companies in Silicon Valley. While locals take pride in his accomplishments, few had much to say about his current life.

 From a Small Village to the Pinnacle of Technology  

Liang comes from an academic family, with his grandfather and parents all being teachers. A neighbor, who shares the same family name, mentioned that Meililing is a village of about a thousand people, all surnamed Liang.

In middle school, one of his teachers recalled that he was a quiet and outstanding student, particularly excelling in mathematics, and had a passion for reading comic books. After graduating from high school in 2002, he enrolled at Zhejiang University, where he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees in computer science, writing his thesis on motion detection algorithms.

After graduating in 2010, he entered the world of automated stock trading, first as an independent trader, then founding the hedge fund High-Flyer in 2015, which became...