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Chinese entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng, founder of AI startup DeepSeek, was named to the Time magazine"100 Most Influential People of 2025" list on Wednesday for shaking up US tech dominance around the world.
"It took a while for Silicon Valley to comprehend exactly what Liang Wenfeng had achieved. But soon markets were reeling, US tech dominance was being openly questioned, and Liang had been propelled to global renown," Time Magazine commended.
On March 27, the Hurun Research Institute released its 2025 Global Rich List, featuring the 40-year-old Liang, who made his debut with a fortune of 33 billion yuan ($44.9 billion).
Officially known as DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Fundamental Technology Research Co Ltd, the firm was founded in July 2023. As an innovative technology startup, DeepSeek is dedicated to developing cutting-edge large language models (LLMs) and related technologies, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
The startup released DeepSeek-R1, a new open-source model on January 20, which quickly soared to the top of Apple's app store's free charts, surpassing OpenAI's ChatGPT, Xinhua reported.
CCTV News reported on February 13 that DeepSeek's usage surged rapidly, becoming the fastest app to surpass 30 million daily active users.
DeepSeek ranked first with 194 million monthly active users in March, according to a report from QuestMobile, a Chinese mobile internet business intelligence service provider on Tuesday. | 
