Where did the DeepSeek team attend university? Not in the United States.
The news that DeepSeek released an AI large language model (LLM) that rivaled OpenAI shocked the world. The small Chinese firm reportedly achieved this feat at a fraction of the price done by the American counterpart, undercutting the business model with a comparable model that is cheaper and open source.
While there have been quibbles about how exactly the DeepSeek team achieved this breakthrough, I was interested in the people behind the model, particularly where they were educated. One claim that I kept hearing was that they were all educated in China, without returnees from American universities.
It is no secret that Liang Wenfeng, the founder and CEO of DeepSeek, was a graduate of Zhejiang University, receiving both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in Engineering from the elite Chinese institution. In building his company, ChinaTalkquoted Liang in an interview:
The team behind the V2 model doesn’t include anyone returning to China from overseas — they are all local. The top 50 experts might not be in China, but perhaps we can train such talents ourselves.
This lack of returnees, or so-called “Sea Turtles” (hǎiguī, 海龟), is fascinating because the trend for years was Chinese students studying in the US and bringing back home innovations. There has been a conception that Chinese universities could not match the US (or other world leaders) in advanced research. The so-called glass ceiling meant that they could achieve a good ranking but could not be among the very elite.
