Origin · 2015 – Jul 2023
Stockpiling AI inside a quant fund's server room
The DeepSeek story doesn't start with an AI paper. It starts in 2015, in an unremarkable server room in Hangzhou, where a dozen engineers folded machine learning into China's stock-market trading systems. Eight years later, High-Flyer Quant had used trading profits to stockpile 10,000 A100s, then quietly carved an AGI lab out of the hedge fund through an internal letter. Every lever that would later move the industry was forged in this stretch.
Events in this era
- 2015Read full →
When machine learning met China's stock market
In 2015, Liang Wenfeng founded High-Flyer Quant in Hangzhou — a dozen engineers folding machine learning into trading, treated almost as heresy at the time. AUM later crossed 100 billion yuan. Those profits became a GPU cluster, not luxury offices — the seed of everything that came after.
- 2020–2021Read full →
Firefly: lighting the path to a private supercluster
High-Flyer launched Firefly-1 (1,100 GPUs, ~200M yuan) then Firefly-2 (~10,000 NVIDIA A100s, over 1B yuan) while most quant funds were still renting cloud compute. Those A100s would later appear in DeepSeek V2 and V3 training logs — the firefly that lit an open-source generational leap.
- April 14, 2023Read full →
A flat announcement, a step into AGI's deep end
On April 14, 2023, High-Flyer Quant — managing 100 billion yuan — quietly announced an AGI research lab. The internal letter called it 'a natural extension of existing capabilities.' A hedge fund had stepped officially into general AI.
- July 17, 2023Read full →
No VC, no KPIs: spinning out on its own terms
On July 17, 2023, DeepSeek spun out of High-Flyer as a standalone company, fully internally funded, no VC. Liang Wenfeng's stated principle: 'We have no commercial pressure. No KPIs.' Operating logic was singular: solve the technical problems, then open-source the results.