In China, Liang Wenfeng is being celebrated as a hero this week, a digital David fighting America’s Big Tech Goliath, armed with a modest cluster of artificial intelligence chips and a small crack team of engineers.
His computational projectile was a series of papers released by his AI start-up DeepSeek, which appeared to show that it was possible to build powerful large language models with far fewer Nvidia chips than US rivals. Global investors wiped?almost $600bn off Nvidia’s market capitalisation as a result, questioning whether pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into gargantuan AI computing clusters was necessary.
These concerns were all far from the minds of Mililing villagers, a small community in the southern province of Guangdong where Liang grew up and where the 40-year-old billionaire returned home for the Lunar New Year holiday, flanked by security guards. Mililing is so small that there appears to have hitherto been nothing written about it online in English.