Thread by @jakobcigrovski

On Dec 23, 2023, Liang Wenfeng bought 2,048 Nvidia chips for $5.6M.

His goal? Build an energy-efficient AI chatbot.

Everyone laughed.

2 years later, it crashed NVIDIA’s stock, hit 100M users, and beat ChatGPT.

His story shows how anyone can build an AI empire in 2025:🧵

Liang was a born businessman:

• Explored financial markets with classmates in 2008
• Attempted to integrate AI with quantitative trading in 2013
• Founded High-Flyer AI in 2019

But in 2023, he decided to take a step further.

Liang launched DeepSeek.

At first, no one knew about it.

But on 20th January 2025, DeepSeek-R1 was launched.

And it changed the AI market forever:

First, we have to know why DeepSeek-R1 got 30M users within few days.

Compared to other chatbots like ChatGPT, it is open-sourced and built with minimal GPUs.

While the West burns billions on chips, DeepSeek outplayed everyone.

But how did he do it?

He found a gap in the market.

IN 2023, before the US government imposed AI chip restrictions on China,

He acquired NVIDIA CPUs.

This was the biggest step forward before the breakthrough.

Then, Liang played it smart.

In just few months, he:

• Built R1 model for just $6M (GPT-4 costs $80–100M)
• Matched OpenAI’s performance with far less compute
• Used just 2,000 Nvidia H800s (Meta’s LLaMA 3 used 16,000 H100s)

DeepSeek-R1 took over the world on the launch day:

• The largest stock crash
• NVIDIA stock down by $600 billion
• Most downloaded AI assistant in the US

This is a core belief that led to his success:

Efficiency and novel approaches in business always beat trend followers.

But it doesn’t stop there.

The future of DeepSeek is even brighter.

What makes it so exciting?

Winning users with open sourcing and making it more aligned with human values.

Liang showed the world you have to play smarter, not harder.

He did it by:

• Innovating instead of following trends
• Taking advantage of the gaps in the market
• Being patient and rising from the shadows

Want to grow your business the same way?

Then keep reading.

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