A Direct Interview with DeepSeek Founder Liang Wenfeng

DeepSeek is an organization driven not by KPIs or a codified organizational structure, but by a vision toward AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) and goodwill. Management's authority stems from consensus, and the company pursues an autonomous culture in which employees are free to use half of their working hours as they wish.

On the strategic side, extreme restraint is emphasized. API pricing is set at a level that recovers hardware costs within 10 months, and the focus is on the essentials rather than chasing corporate trends. Furthermore, even the most powerful models will be released as open source, with greater interest placed on the deployability of models than on competition.

The roadmap toward AGI proceeds through the following stages:

• CoT (Chain of Thought)
• Agents
• Continual Learning
• Singularity
• Embodied Intelligence

Current computing resources stand at around 20,000 H-equivalent GPUs, roughly 12–18 months behind the US, but the goal is to reach a stage, through continual learning, where the model develops its own next version.