Comment by thenaturalist
1 day ago
> Most likely, without any intention on their part.
I think this is a very, very naive assumption.
The founder is a quant with involvements in domestic investments and market design and pricing for decades - in China.
As seen with the case of Jack Ma, after you cross a certain level, there is no such thing as "not involved with politics" in China.
Liang knows exactly what he's doing.
> During 2021, Liang started buying thousands of Nvidia GPUs for his AI side project while running High-Flyer. Some industry insiders viewed it as the eccentric actions of a billionaire looking for a new hobby. One of Liang's business partners said they initially did not take Liang seriously and described their first meeting as seeing a very nerdy guy with a terrible hairstyle who could not articulate his vision. Liang simply said he wanted to build something and it will be a game changer which his business partners thought was only possible from giants such as ByteDance and Alibaba Group.
> During that month in an interview with 36Kr, Liang stated that High-Flyer had acquired 10,000 Nvidia A100 GPUs before the US government imposed AI chip restrictions on China.
> On 20 January 2025, Liang was invited to the Symposium with Experts, Entrepreneurs and Representatives from the Fields of Education, Science, Culture, Health and Sports (专家、企业家和教科文卫体等领域代表座谈会) hosted by Premier Li Qiang in Beijing. Liang, being considered as an industry expert, was asked to provide opinions and suggestions on a draft for comments of the annual 2024 government work report.
> On 17 February 2025, Liang along with the heads of other Chinese technology companies attended a symposium hosted by President Xi Jinping at the Great Hall of the People in Beijing.
Whether he intended to or not initially, what happens with DeepSeek is now out of this man's hand and will be 100% influenced by politics.
The chip bans and dual use nature of the technology have catapulted Liang to the first row of CCP tech strategists' attention, for sure.
I know that Americans are the saints and everyone else is evil… everyone else being gentiles and all. But other than that, is there any other point you are trying to make?