DeepSeek's Normally Boring CEO Is Reportedly Spiraling After Supposed Leak

A planned funding round at Hangzhou, China-based hedge fund and unexpected AI juggernaut DeepSeek has probably been cancelled. According to a very delicately worded Bloomberg report, this comes just on the heels of the supposed leak of a long, off-the-cuff conversation with the company’s reclusive founder and CEO, Liang Wenfeng, that went viral. The conversation in question would read as extremely dull to most people, but went viral for being more than a bit impolitic if you’re an extremely AI-brained person. The actual viral quotes are sort of lost in the Backrooms, if you will, and can’t be officially confirmed to have happened at all. They were apparently posted by a news publication owned by Chinese tech conglomerate Tencent, but there’s now a dead link in older articles and blog posts about this incident. The English language version of the transcript purportedly survives as an un-authenticated PDF posted to Github, but don’t blindly trust that link. So part of what makes the delay of the funding round so intriguing to DeepSeek watchers is that it’s making analysts, like Kyle Chan of Brookings, more confident that the interview was real in the first place. I was a bit hesitant