The Chinese company DeepSeek seemed to have come out of nowhere this week when it upturned markets. Here’s what to know about Liang Wenfeng, the engineer who started it.

The 40-year-old founder of China's DeepSeek, an AI startup that has startled markets with its capacity to compete with industry leaders like OpenAI, kept a low profile as he built up a hedge fund that now manages a reported $8 billion in assets.

DeepSeek, a Hangzhou-based startup founded in 2023, shot to the top of Apple’s App Store free app chart after releasing a new open-source AI model it says rivals OpenAI's work. Its website was hit by outages amid a spike in interest.