DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng: Full Remarks From an Investor Meeting

Full English translation<br>DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng: Full Remarks From an Investor Meeting<br>A polished English translation based on the full Chinese transcript.<br>July 2026<br>Takeaways<br>What matters in these remarks<br>DeepSeek frames its long-term goal as AGI, with commercialization treated as a necessary byproduct rather than the central mission.<br>Liang repeatedly argues that open source is not charity or marketing, but a form of strategic restraint required by the scale of AI.<br>The company sees models as internal research accelerators first: the next model should help build the next model.<br>Compute remains a constraint, but DeepSeek is trying to narrow the gap through efficiency, smaller models, and lower-level stack rewrites such as TileLang.<br>The remarks emphasize culture: no KPI-heavy management, no broad application sprawl, and a preference for focused research teams.

Opening Remarks<br>Liang Wenfeng<br>Welcome, everyone.<br>When we first started this company, we were not thinking about how much money we would eventually make, whether we would go to the capital markets, whether we would list, or anything like that. That was never the original intention. The first few dozen people who joined us did not think that way at all. If they had, they would not have come.<br>Broadly speaking, we began this work with a great deal of goodwill toward the world. We believed this was useful to humanity. It was something beyond money. Of course, once the potential value became enormous, other temptations appeared. That is a separate matter. But our original intention, our vision, and the vision we have kept to this day have never been built around maximizing commercial profit. I think that point is crucial.<br>About twenty years ago, the manager I admired most was Jack Welch, the former CEO of GE. Looking back now, much of what he said may no longer be right. But he was right about one essential thing: the most important thing in a company is its vision. A large company is not managed by rules and regulations. It is held together by vision.<br>What is vision?<br>Vision is not a slogan hanging on a wall. Vision is what you do, not what you say. It is how you actually operate. I no longer remember Welch's exact words, but that was roughly the idea.<br>So how do we manage so many people? How do we organize ourselves? In truth, we do not really have an organization in the conventional sense. We are organized by vision. We use a shared vision to bring people together. That has advantages, and it has disadvantages.<br>In the future, we will try to keep the strengths and compensate for the weaknesses. But this is our character. We are not managed by KPIs or formal evaluations. We are driven only by vision. That vision is not even written down. It has never been written into any document. It lives in the way we do things and in our attitude toward the world.<br>Different people in the company may understand the vision differently. Each person's version may not be exactly the same. But in the broad direction, we are aligned.<br>I think the heart of it is still this: we approach the world with goodwill, and we want to do something meaningful. That is what holds us together.<br>I will speak first, and then we can take questions. I will probably keep coming back to this vision, because it is real. It is not a story we invented. We really think this way, and we really act this way. Otherwise, many of the things we do would be impossible to explain.<br>Why are we so committed to open source?<br>Because the vision itself requires open source. Without that vision, you cannot organize people this way. Some companies also open source, but their open source is different from ours. Their open source has a sense of being forced. It does not feel like what they truly wanted. For us, it is exactly what we wanted. From the very beginning, we were very clear about this.<br>First, there is vision. Second, we believe that if AI is to succeed commercially, open source is beneficial. That may sound contradictory, even counterintuitive, because historically open source and commercialization have often been in conflict. But AI is different from previous software.<br>Historically, a software company might have a market worth only a few billion dollars a year. If it open sourced its product, that market might shrink to tens or hundreds of millions. But AI is large enough that, in the end, it may account for something like 10 percent of human GDP. That is an enormous number.<br>No single person or company can monopolize something that large. You have to share it with others, or you will not survive. This is different from open sourcing a smaller piece of software, because the market was never that large. AI is simply too big. If we try to monopolize all of its benefits, history will discard us. I think this is an objective law, a view of history.<br>It is not that if I keep everything closed, I can monopolize the market. In theory, that does not...