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DeepSeek-R1's January 2025 release proved a frontier reasoning model could be trained for under $6 million, wiping nearly $1T off U.S. tech stocks in a single day and forcing every major lab to revisit its training-cost assumptions.
Liang Wenfeng founded DeepSeek in 2023 as the AI arm of his quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer and released DeepSeek-R1 in January 2025 — a reasoning model trained for a fraction of OpenAI's cost that wiped roughly $1 trillion off U.S.
tech stocks on its debut. Liang has consistently published model weights open-source.
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