29-year-old 'AI prodigy' attracts attention at DeepSeek

China's groundbreaking AI model DeepSeek has been taking the tech world by storm these past few days, surpassing well-known competitors such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude AI. DeepSeek's success is not only due to its founder Liang Wenfeng, but also to the talented young team of innovators who have developed cutting-edge AI technology with limited resources.

One of the team's standout members is Luo Fuli, dubbed China's "AI prodigy." The 29-year-old researcher has received widespread acclaim from experts for her pioneering contributions to natural language processing (NLP).

Luo’s journey began at Beijing Normal University, where she initially struggled with the computer science program but eventually graduated with honors. She later took a position at Peking University’s Institute of Computational Linguistics, publishing eight papers at the prestigious ACL conference in China in 2019.

Luo’s achievements attracted tech giants Alibaba and Xiaomi, paving the way for her successful career later on. As a researcher at Alibaba’s DAMO Academy, Luo spearheaded the development of the multilingual pretrained model VECO and made significant contributions to the open-source AliceMind project.

Luo joined DeepSeek in 2022 with natural language processing expertise, playing a key role in the development of DeepSeek V2 and being praised for his ability to compete head-to-head with ChatGPT.

While working at DeepSeek, Luo's special skills caught the attention of Xiaomi founder Lei Jun, who offered her an annual salary of 10 million yuan (35 billion VND). Luo is said to have not accepted the offer from Xiaomi's boss.

DeepSeek’s young team of researchers is mostly Chinese, hailing from some of the country’s top schools such as Tsinghua University and Peking University. The company has offices in Beijing and Hangzhou with nearly 140 researchers and engineers, far behind major Chinese and American companies in the AI ​​field.

“The top 50 talents may not be in China, but we can create them ourselves,” DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng told 36Kr of his determination to create homegrown talent. “Innovation first requires confidence. That confidence is often more evident in young people.”

DeepSeek is still hiring deep learning researchers, engineers, and user interface designers. The highest-paying engineering positions are 90,000 yuan ($12,400) per month. By comparison, the top salary for a Google software engineer is about $29,000, according to Levels.fyi.