DeepSeek Founder Promises to Keep Flagship Models Open Source in $71 Billion AI Expansion
DeepSeek founder Wenfeng said the company will prioritize artificial general intelligence research over profit and is likely to keep its largest models open source, following a financing round of more than $7 billion that valued the firm at about $71 billion.
Wenfeng plans to spend all available capital within six months to acquire GPUs, targeting 50,000 Nvidia GB300 chips or 200,000 Huawei 950s for upcoming training workloads. He stated that new software frameworks are rapidly dismantling Nvidia’s CUDA ecosystem and expects China to close the comprehensive AI gap with the U.S. to three years by mid-2027.
From the sources (15 posts)
@poezhao0605DeepSeek closed a round of more than $7bn. Barely a month later, it began talks for a new round at a $71bn pre-money valuation. Its management has signaled that frontier research takes precedence over near-term revenue. My latest ⬇️
@teortaxestexFull transcript of Wenfeng's investor conference call. He's a lot more forceful here. He is insistent that open sourcing is *the* agenda. If you're not on board, go buy more Zhipu. And crucially, he says restraint is *the only way to surviv
@teortaxestexDeepSeek as of early June had 20K "H-equivalent" units (H100). Wenfeng intends to spend everything in 6 months, "basically all NVIDIA". «If we could convert all the money into GPUs, we'd convert every cent without hesitation—and we're willi
@teortaxestexLOTS OF ALPHA FROM WENFENG HERE He expects he won't be able to spend >20B RMB on compute in 2026 «The smartest people—maybe less than 50% stay in China» «The largest current model activates ≈800B parameters» «I'd need about 50K GB300s, o
@teortaxestexOn domestic compute: bullish within a year. «Domestic AI chips have no problems in hardware or ecosystem—the only problem is insufficient production capacity» «Previously, domestic GPU adaptation had a problem called poor ecosystem… The mo
@teortaxestexOn Huawei: «we participate deeply in Huawei's ecosystem» «Huawei gives us capacity for about 16,000 GPUs; internet giants might get over a 100K… but this may already be all the capacity Huawei has.» «So we can't count on training the next b
@teortaxestex950s vs Nvidia: «when V3 trained, it still used NVIDIA GPUs, but no longer used NVIDIA's ecosystem… As long as I redo this whole process on Huawei GPUs, it's done. I think this might be a historic mission» «Huawei 950 supernode can fully su
@teortaxestexLiang Wenfeng believes that the comprehensive gap in AI between China and the US is 12-18 months, just like Kai-Fu Lee says and Dario hopes; and can be shrunk to 3, with surpassing in some few key areas. @scaling01 @zephyr_z9
@teortaxestexThis is extraordinary. This is what I expected of China that gets serious about compute independence. A 14nm chip that has Hopper+ level utility. Yes it runs HOT, but it gets the job done. 6.4TB/s now. 20TB/s – Rubin level – in 2027. Electr
@teortaxestexRT @teortaxesTex: Liang Wenfeng believes that the comprehensive gap in AI between China and the US is 12-18 months, just like Kai-Fu Lee sa…
@poezhao0605The detail worth sitting with: China's flagship domestic GPU company gets its best inference numbers by pooling its own chips with foreign ones. Import substitution, built on top of the imports.
@teortaxestex«So we simply won't consider competing with the US at that scale now… when we have more resources later, we'll push to 150B, 156B, or 250B activation scale.» «You could force-train a model that big, but you couldn't do sufficient research»
@firstsquawkDEEPSEEK CEO WENFENG: ADVANCEMENTS ‘SUCH AS TILELANG ARE EXPECTED TO RAPIDLY LOWER THE BARRIERS TO ENTRY CREATED BY THE CUDA ECOSYSTEM’
@reutersFounder says DeepSeek prioritises AGI over profit, likely to keep top models open-source, Yicai reports
@reutersFounder says DeepSeek prioritises AGI over profit, likely to keep top models open-source, Yicai reports