Here's your Forbes Daily Briefing for Friday, January 31st. Today on Forbes, here's how much

AI firm Deepseek and its founder are worth. On January 20th, on the same day as Donald Trump's

inauguration in Washington, Chinese premier Li Chiang held a meeting with experts to consult on the Chinese

government's policies for the year ahead. It was a low-key event that got little attention

outside of China. One of the few people to speak at the gathering was Liang Wang Feng, a

bespeckled hedge fund founder and AI entrepreneur who was then little known outside the country.

That was also the day, his firm, Deepseek, launched its latest model, R1, and claimed it

rivals OpenAI's latest reasoning model. Within a week, Deepseek's app had rocketed to the top

of app stores in the United States, dethroning those of its competitors, DeepSeek's app had rocketed to the top of app stores in the United States,

dethroning those of its competitors, including OpenAI's Chat-G-T and Anthropics Claude,

and turning Leung and his AI firm, DeepSeek, into household names.

The best-known AI startups in the U.S. are worth tens of billions of dollars, ranging from

$50 billion for Elon Musk's XAI to $157 billion for Open AI, and they have raised huge

sums from the world's most prominent investors, including Microsoft, Amazon, and Silicon Valley's

top venture capital shops. Unlike its U.S. competitors,

DeepSeek appears to have no external investors outside of Liang and his three co-founders.

According to Chinese corporate records, Leung owns about 84% of the Hangzhou-based firm,

which he founded in 2023 and financed with funds from High Flyer Capital Management,

the quantitative trading hedge fund he co-founded in 2015.

So how much is Liang's open-source AI model worth?

Forbes spoke to five analysts and investors who offered a range of potential valuations,

but the three who provided a specific number

...