Where Deepseek, Qwen's AI Engineers Really Come From

2025-02-16 10:13:55

(MENAFN- Asia Times) The recent rise of DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen artificial intelligence platforms is a hot topic among technology experts and investors in China and the United States. Yet specific information about the Chinese engineering teams remains scarce.

An Asia Times analysis using public information on the backgrounds of the two chatbots' developers may help draw a clearer picture of how DeepSeek and Qwen emerged.

Based on publicly available research papers and media reports, DeepSeek and Qwen's engineering teams do not collaborate or overlap.

The only linkage between the duo is that DeepSeek's researchers said in a paper on January 22 this year that they had“distilled” Qwen2.5, and also Meta's Llama, to develop DeepSeek-R1. The launch of DeepSeek-R1 caused a slump in the US stock market in late January.

Some analysts believe that DeepSeek, an open-source AI, may also have used“knowledge distillation” to extract data from OpenAI's ChatGPT and train its AI models. However, no conclusive evidence has been made public that it did so.

According to the January 22 paper, DeepSeek-R1 has 16 core contributors, some of whom have direct connections with Microsoft Research Asia (MSRA ) and the China Computer Federation (CCF).

Core contributor Yu Wu was supervised by MSRA's Ming Zhou in his PhD program at Beihang University from 2014 to 2019. He was a full-time intern at MSRA from 2013 to 2019 before joining it as an associate researcher in 2019.

Core contributor Daya Guo was also supervised by Ming Zhou during his PhD program at Guangzhou's Sun Yat-sen University from 2018 to 2023. He was mentored by Nan Duan in 2020-2023 and by Duyu Tang in 2017-2020 in MSRA's Natural Language Computing Group.

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