Yu Lili, the first person in China’s science and technology media in 2024, although many people have never heard of her name. After deepseek exploded, we discovered that Liang Wenfeng had only been interviewed twice, and the answers to dozens of underlying questions all came from Lili. Without this person, this epic breakthrough in China’s science and technology media would only be able to tell the world in their underwear: we know nothing about the hero.
The mainstream of the media industry is a group of palace maids competing for favor, opening their chests and pounced on the bigwigs, in order to get a little inside information, grab the interview opportunities of the bigwigs, and use all their means to be turned over to the brand. As for the speculators among the entrepreneurs, their strategy is to “make friends” with the media, give face and give orders, in exchange for the labels of “China’s OpenAI” and “technological idealism”. A group of actors worked together to create Vanity Fair, suck the attention of the masses, and deceive the world and steal fame.
Yu Lili is stronger than a hundred famous journalists and internet celebrities, and Liang Wenfeng is stronger than ten thousand Olympic champions and returnee doctors. They do not pick the low-hanging fruit, but wholeheartedly sink into the water. They do not add flowers to brocade, but send charcoal in snow. They are true believers who practice swordsmanship without seeking fame. They are the children who see through the emperor’s new clothes.
This is not praise, it is a show of strength. Liang Wenfeng and Yu Lili are just names, their true identity is a subconscious. Yu Lili said on her Moments that she used to be a cultural journalist and she was impressed by the real cultural attraction on Liang Wenfeng. Liang Wenfeng said that technological advantage is temporary, and the real moat is culture and organization.
We ask deepseek, just to receive the energy of technology and products, but to truly understand these people in our souls, only then can we receive spiritual energy. It is spiritual energy that shapes these people, that is the reason.
Lu Qi is Ultraman’s old friend, and also a former colleague at the YC startup incubator. He once told a story. In the early days of Ultraman’s entrepreneurship, he received a call from a client one day, saying that he had been eliminated in the bidding. Ultraman immediately flew over, and the next morning when the client arrived at the company, Ultraman was already waiting at the door. He turned the tide and finally won the deal.
This story really disappointed me, Ultraman is not the chosen one. True strength is not shown in persistent pursuit, but in having my things ten times better than everyone else, so that the other person waits outside my door overnight, not the other way around.
I started as a journalist in 2003. A senior colleague once said, ‘You need to interview 50 entrepreneurs a year, weave your network, and lock in the next Ding Lei and Chen Tianqiao in advance. When they reach the top, your relationship with them will be extraordinary.’
I am also very disappointed by this well-intentioned reminder. I don’t think the value of a journalist comes from their relationship with the richest person, or from being in the same frame as them, being crowned by them, or seeking investment when starting a business. There was once a big star who was asked when she would marry into a wealthy family. She said, ‘I am the wealthy family.’
Ultraman and Liang Wenfeng were both born in 1985. Ultraman is a Silicon Valley style, dropped out of school to start a business, and achieved some success. He was successively invested by two Silicon Valley giants, Graham and Till, and then became their partner, crowned by them. Liang Wenfeng, on the other hand, is a different species. He completed his master’s degree and has been unknown for more than ten years.
In 2015, both 30 years old, Ultraman surpassed Bigram and Till to team up with Musk to co-found OpenAI, while Liang Wenfeng independently founded the quantitative fund Magic Square. It uses AI as a tool for stock trading and uses stock trading to refine AI. This is Liang Wenfeng’s dual-wheeled fire.
What’s even more different is that, looking back seven years before 2015, until 2008, Ultraman started a mobile internet business, and then became the head of YC, none of which had anything to do with AI. On the other hand, Liang Wenfeng, who had just graduated from Zhejiang University, set his sights on AI at the age of 23. He contemplated in a residential building in Chengdu, where the deepest soil for AI lies. He set off at least 7 years ahead of Ultraman.
Ultraman turned OpenAI from a non-profit project to a for-profit project, seeking investment from Microsoft, which led to a fallout with Musk and being forced into a palace coup by Sutskever. Liang Wenfeng grew himself with the money from a quantitative fund, so in his world, there are no constraints from Microsoft, no fallout with Musk, no political coup by Sutskever, and no infighting.
Liang Wenfeng’s freedom was gained by setting off 7 years in advance. And these 7 years are the fruit of an original intention. This original intention determines everything, determining the epic turnaround we see today.
When the computing power becomes a bottleneck in 2023, analysts suddenly discovered that in addition to four major companies, there is also a magic square with ten thousand NVIDIA boards, a name that is almost unheard of in the Internet circle.
Behind this cold number, a young man has spent 15 years on this track, crawling like a turtle. When electric cars broke out in 2021, Wang Chuanfu had been crawling on this track for more than 20 years. BYD in 2021 is the same as Deepseek in 2025.
The more magical fact is that when Ultraman and Musk established OpenAI in 2015, Liang Wenfeng already had 100 boards in his hands. We don’t know when he got his first board, maybe in 2012, when Hinton used four boards to run neural networks, and opened the door to the explosion of AI. It was also when Google paid $44 million to defeat Baidu and win over Hinton’s apprentices. The seeds have long been planted, but no one knew.
This is a story of the tortoise and the hare race, an ancient oriental story, but it is not the core yet.
In the authorized autobiography of Ultraman, the author Zhou Hengxing writes: What Ultraman is best at is to instantly identify the most powerful person in the room and make this person like him. He is not a geek, but a politician. He bows to the strong, helps enemies, makes enemies with old friends, and allies with opponents.
Liang Wenfeng is different. Yu Lili asked, how do you confirm that you are the most suitable person? Liang Wenfeng said, if we love this thing and have the ability to do this thing, then we are the most suitable person. The difference between Liang Wenfeng and Ultraman is whether your energy comes from inside or outside. If it comes from the outside, it is a chemical reaction. If it comes from the inside, it is a nuclear reaction.
From the beginning of their graduation, Wang Xing and Huang Zhen have been seeking various opportunities and trying various methods. Zhang Yiming has been shuttling between big and small companies, and between Zhichun Road and Zhongguancun, absorbing various experiences and resources. Toutman is their gathering, he is the social center of Silicon Valley, the heir of the big shots, and he has been designing a new world from AI to nuclear energy, from world currency to universal basic income.
Only Liang Wenfeng was completely lonely from the beginning, digging out all the elements from within himself. Isn’t that graduate sitting alone in a residential building in Chengdu in 2008, what the French director Truffaut said: embracing ambition crazily, being crazy sincere. Isn’t it the same as Wang Guowei’s description of a realm of life: last night the west wind withered the green trees, alone on the high building, looking out at the end of the world.
Sutskewei is a geek in the West, and Otterman is a politician in the West. They have a hostile relationship. So this geek launched a coup against the politician, hoping to replace him and gain control over the most powerful technology. However, he suffered a disastrous defeat. But next, the politician in the West was pierced by a geek from the East.
Liang Wenfeng’s success is the success of long-termism, the success of introverts, and pure success. It is the failure of speculators, actors, and politicians, and the failure of cunning.
Chinese companies eligible for national-level sanctions by the United States. The first generation is Huawei, and the second generation is TikTok. The difference between the two is that Huawei’s telecommunications equipment is targeted at a few enterprises and has not penetrated the United States market in a timely manner, while TikTok serves the masses and has attracted half of the American population as users. Therefore, banning Huawei only requires a ban, while banning TikTok has caused outrage.
TikTok is like a Trojan horse, which is the first thing Chinese people have achieved. You claim to be free, but you are not. You advocate competition, but fear competition. Huawei exposes Americans’ underwear to everyone except Americans. TikTok exposes this underwear to Americans themselves.
deepseek is the third generation. When Zhang Yiming promoted TikTok to the world, he aggressively acquired users within a limited time window. Once missed, it could be surpassed by competitors. However, today deepseek is dominating the charts in over a hundred countries simultaneously without any advertising investment.
TikTok is just an entertainment black hole, but deepseek is productivity, it can mass produce new nuclear bombs like Einstein. So the US wants to expel TikTok, but when facing deepseek, they want a complete chip ban and complete decoupling.
An Indian said decades ago that the United States is a closed-minded open system, while China is an open-minded closed system. Today, its reality is a closed OpenAI and an open deepseek.
The open system of the United States, because it has an open financial and open information platform. China’s semi-closed system, because the RMB cannot be freely exchanged, and there is also an information firewall.
The brutal embargo on Huawei, TikTok, and deepseek is the closed-mindedness of the United States. The essence of the U.S. open system is to win. If my strength completely overwhelms others, an open system is most advantageous in attracting resources and talent. But when someone can challenge my strength, openness instantly turns into closure. This is the closure of the mind, the closure of the soul.
But the Chinese way of thinking is not zero-sum, but coexistence. In this closed space of the East Asian continent, survival requires compromise, sharing, and the cultural strategy that has been formed for thousands of years. Therefore, open source is exactly in line with the Chinese soul, so deepseek is open source, attracting allies such as Nvidia, Microsoft, and Amazon to grow within the United States.
The cross is the totem of the West, which is the thing that nailed Jesus to death. The cross is composed of two straight lines, and the straight lines extend infinitely without an end point, which is an open system. But the farther away the ends of the straight line are, the straight lines divide each other, which is a binary opposition world, heaven against hell, angels against demons, winners and losers are irreconcilable. This is closed thinking.
The Tai Chi diagram is a totem of China. Tai Chi is first and foremost a circle, with the yin-yang fish living within it, forming a closed system. The Tai Chi diagram has no straight lines, only curves, representing the interdependence of yin and yang. This demonstrates an open-mindedness. Therefore, Chinese people learn from their opponents and seek coexistence with everyone. The Tai Chi diagram is expressed in the most concise language as “harmony in diversity”.
In this kind of ideological soil, a 23-year-old graduate enjoys loneliness in the poor streets, and he can only face his soul deeply. Who am I, where am I going, I prepare all my own dry food, I don’t need anyone to understand, I walk all the way step by step. Then, a person grows into a forest.
Today, at least one-third to one-half of the top AI practitioners on the planet are Chinese. Most of them are in the United States, such as Andrew Ng and Fei-Fei Li, while a small number are in China, either as renowned entrepreneurs like Zhang Yiming or alongside big shots like Zhang Yiming.
But it was not until deepseek emerged that everyone realized that the best AI experts were all in a small team, and none of them had a degree from the United States. They were all pure locals.
A Japanese Nobel laureate once said that the East Asian exam-oriented education system has destroyed many lives. But if lives are destroyed, why do some people win the Nobel Prize, why are there East Asian economic miracles. A sociologist also said that grinding for ten years, never having the chance to ride a fine horse in a lifetime. In China, people with university education cannot make original scientific and technological innovations. Then what about Shi Yigong, Yang Zhilin, and Pan Wenfeng.
In the 30 years since the reform and opening up, Tsinghua University and Peking University, which have enrolled 90% of China’s college entrance examination champions, have seen a significant number of science and engineering students go to the United States. Most of them have not returned to China and have become software engineers for Indians and Angsana people. As for those who have returned to China, from Zhang Chaoyang and Robin Li to later Huang Zheng and Wang Xing, the businesses they have created are a hundred times better than those of the people who stayed in the United States.
But these sea turtles lost to the locals who have never been abroad. The earliest Zhang Chaoyang and Liang Jianzhang lost to Ding Lei and Chen Tianqiao. Later, Li Yanhong was overshadowed by Ma Huateng and Jack Ma, Huang Zheng and Wang Xing were not as good as Zhang Yiming, and today Yang Zhilin was completely defeated by Liang Wenfeng. And then in the new energy sector, there are two extraordinary figures, Wang Chuanfu and Zeng Yuqun. This dominance is comprehensive, with almost no exception.
These people are all the fruits of China. If the collective culture of a unified society would bind people’s creativity, then why should these people and this land single-handedly challenge the United States?
Standardized test-oriented education can constrain people’s thinking. But it has a major advantage, which is to sharpen one’s mind in a certain direction, constantly improving oneself. The reality is not about letting a hundred flowers bloom, but about the boss wanting to step on everyone. In the jungle world, as long as the fist is a bit bigger, it will overwhelm everyone, just like scoring one more point can eliminate a thousand people.
In a world where the law of the jungle prevails, there is not so much peace in the passage of time. To be born in suffering and die in comfort is the harshest reality of education. Tiger parents know this deep down in their hearts.
The shortcomings of standardized test-oriented education are offset by two other things. Real education is in society, not in school. The power of the market economy is a hundred times stronger than that of exams. Since 1978, the market economy has taught the Chinese people that there is no standard answer. They can only unleash their unique abilities to meet the unique needs of others.
Entering 1995, the Internet became a hundred-fold leverage, added to the market economy. On the Internet, everyone’s potential is almost zero cost to be stimulated.
The fire of Guo Youcai in Shandong has attracted various Internet celebrities to the empty space in front of Zibo Station overnight. They perform desperately, some performing ugliness, some performing wildness, giving people visual and auditory impact, making me realize that the combination of market economy and the Internet has completely shattered the constraints of standardized education.
Those who use standardized education and one indicator to judge the freedom of the Chinese are themselves unfree and unfree in spirit. They subconsciously lack the ability to seek truth from facts, and they say they are afraid of standard answers, but in fact they have already taken everything in the West as the standard answer. They are the kind of people they themselves hate.
When standardized education meets market economy and the Internet, Chinese people have two things at the same time: the safety of the back of the knife and the sharpness of the blade, the weight of the back of the knife and the agility of the blade. Just like the Yin-Yang fish in the Tai Chi diagram.
The three most powerful ethnic groups on Earth today are the Angsa people, the Jewish people, and the Chinese. The Angsa people ruled the Earth for 400 years from Britain to the United States, but the Jewish people and the Chinese have continued undefeated for thousands of years. The history of the Jewish people is in the Old Testament and the Talmud. The Chinese heritage is found in the Book of Changes and the Analects of Confucius.
Jews and Chinese are two extremes. The Jews are a nomadic culture of trade, and they belong to the sea. The Chinese are an agrarian and settled culture, and we belong to the land. So today the Jews sailed away, allied themselves with the Angsa, and even kidnapped the Angsa, while the Chinese competed with the Angsa in their own territory.
There are 10,000 angles to explain how powerful the Jews are, and the most important thing is in one fact. Google’s Page is Jewish, Facebook’s Zuckerberg is Jewish, PayPal’s mob boss and incubating Trump’s successor Vance Thiel is Jewish, OpenAI’s Ultraman and Sutzkvi are Jewish, Ellison, who wants to help OpenAI build Stargate, is Jewish, and 20% of the Ivy League schools are Jewish. The strength of all Jews is at this origin, and they cultivate geniuses.
A long-time friend who often goes abroad said that Jews and Chinese have a very similar characteristic: they highly value education and both are tiger parents. However, Jews are more open-minded and value practical skills the most. They question and innovate. Chinese, on the other hand, value standardized knowledge the most and seek a stable position within a system. Standardized knowledge is the ladder for climbing up within this system.
The openness of the Jews comes from the Mediterranean, the place where the three continents of Europe, Asia, and Africa meet without natural barriers. They must survive in the constant collision and even killing between people. Order is accidental, chaos is inevitable.
At the same time, the Chinese people of that period lived on the East Asian continent, surrounded by the sea, plateaus, tropical jungles, and deserts, forming an inevitable unity in this enclosed space. The first element of this unity is to ensure stability, and tools such as the imperial examination system and standardized education were used to maintain stability and unity. They were all driven by the need for survival, and the Chinese people’s nature took the opposite path to the Jews.
So Teal commented on Ultraman, there is no place in the world where he feels completely belonging. Graham says that if Ultraman is parachuted onto a cannibal island, he will be king in five years. This is a Jew at heart.
Liang Wenfeng was born in Guangdong and went to college in Zhejiang, which is a commercially developed coastal area. However, after graduation, he chose the opposite direction. He did not go to the coastal areas or stay in the major cities such as Beijing, Shanghai, Guangzhou, and Shenzhen. Instead, he went to the inland, to a residential building in a heavily atmospheric basin. Perhaps the genes of agricultural civilization are calling him to return to the soil for thorough absorption of nutrients.
The closure of the East Asian continent was inevitably pierced by the sharpness of the Mediterranean in 1840. In the following 100 years, the closed party, in order to survive, had to absorb the nutrition of openness, so there was a market economy and the internet. They internalized openness as part of themselves. Therefore, today, Chinese people have strict fathers and kind mothers, some say no, and some say yes. The yin and yang fish in the Tai Chi diagram are perfectly reflected today.
China’s digital heroes emerge in endless numbers, their fundamental vitality, their fundamental operating system, lies in the fact that they must be free souls. They see the charm of the distance, but also the profoundness of the land under their feet. They do not adhere to old ways, nor blindly follow. Only in this way can they live themselves into the totem of Tai Chi.
Although Liang Wenfeng’s glory today is ten times that of Zhang Yiming, the future troubles may also be ten times as well. Algorithms create information cocoons, but may be far less than the invisible control of AI on people.
Technical elites are always obsessed with technical egalitarianism, and Liang Wenfeng is no exception. deepseek achieves the strongest reasoning ability at 1/20 of the cost, accelerating the popularization of AI capabilities. However, the popularization of technological power will inevitably bring about the popularization of corruption.
When the microphone is only in the hands of a few people, even if they are corrupt, they are supervised by most people. If you give the microphone to everyone, no one will be supervised, and most people will poison each other every day, leading to a mob society.
So one day you put such a super weapon as AGI into everyone’s hands, either it’s a time a hundred times more chaotic than today, or you anesthetize and control them at the source of AGI, it’s a time of walking dead.
After having mechanical power, most people’s bodies become weak. After the convenience brought by technology and the market, most people become impatient. And after AGI brings intelligence, most people will become even more foolish and arrogant because of their foolishness.
In Western legend, humans wanted to build a tower to reach the heavens and be on equal footing with God. But God changed their language, making it impossible for them to communicate, and they scattered, causing the tower to collapse.
Today’s technology is like a tower to reach the heavens, where humans can do anything and create intelligence. But the cocoon of information formed by algorithms has torn humanity apart, making it impossible for people to communicate and causing everyone to struggle. And when AGI replaces humans and tames them, humans will enter the “ability cocoon”. Everything humans think they have will be an illusion, and they will become puppets of AGI. At that time, it will not be tearing between people, but tearing within oneself.
When AGI is inevitably coming, Sutskever’s “super alignment” should be the only solution to save humanity. My understanding of super alignment is to express the principles of “good people are smarter” and “altruism generates wisdom” in mathematics.
The Western concept of the prime directive for robots is that machines must never harm humans and must never allow humans to come to harm. However, this is a wishful mechanical way of thinking, as Hitler-style humans can change the rules themselves. Also, since humans know that rules are meant to be broken, when machines are smarter than humans, they know it too.
The ultimate reliance can only be ‘good people are smarter.’ It is the Eastern Pangu creating the world and the Western God creating the world. The natural laws and moral principles are already written into every inch of time and space at that origin. Only by solidifying it into an algorithm that humans can operate can we ensure that the strongest power is inevitably a power of kindness. If this is achieved, it is a true epic turning point.
