Meet Luo Fuli, the Dynamic “AI Prodigy” Behind DeepSeek’s Global Success

China’s AI model DeepSeek has emerged as a tough competitor to ChatGPT and Gemini, making waves globally.

The Chinese chatbot has surged to the top of the Apple App Store charts, surpassing ChatGPT, and has even influenced the U.S. stock market.

At the heart of DeepSeek’s success is a team of young innovators, among whom Luo Fuli stands out. The 29-year-old researcher has been garnering attention in China, earning titles such as “AI Prodigy” and “Genius AI Gal” for her groundbreaking contributions to natural language processing (NLP).

Who is Luo Fuli?

Luo Fuli is a graduate of Peking University and made a significant impact in 2019 when she published eight papers at the prestigious ACL (Association for Computational Linguistics) conference. Her achievements caught the attention of major tech giants like Alibaba and Xiaomi.

As a researcher at Alibaba, she led the development of the multilingual pre-training model VECO and played a key role in advancing the open-source AliceMind project.

In 2022, Luo joined DeepSeek, which has since emerged as a major competitor to ChatGPT. Recognizing her exceptional talent, Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, later offered her an annual compensation package of 10 million yuan.

What is DeepSeek?

Founded in 2023 in Hangzhou, China, DeepSeek released its first large language model later that year. Its CEO, Liang Wenfeng, previously co-founded High-Flyer, one of China’s top hedge funds specializing in AI-driven quantitative trading.

By 2022, High-Flyer had amassed 10,000 Nvidia A100 graphics processor chips, essential for training and running AI models. However, that same year, the U.S. imposed restrictions on sales of these high-performance chips to China.

In response, DeepSeek adapted by building its latest models using Nvidia’s H800 chips, which remain available in China. This move sent a strong message that cutting-edge AI research does not necessarily require the most advanced hardware.

DeepSeek gained significant industry attention last month after releasing a new AI model that it claimed was on par with leading U.S. AI models, including those from OpenAI. Additionally, it positioned itself as more cost-effective, optimizing the use of expensive Nvidia chips to train its system efficiently.

The chatbot became even more widely accessible when it launched on the Apple and Google app stores earlier this year, further expanding its reach.

(With inputs from AP)