The documentary highlights Deepseek, a Chinese AI company founded by Liang Wenfeng, which has rapidly advanced with open, affordable models that challenge Western dominance in AI through innovative techniques and transparency. It explores the geopolitical implications, the company’s ambitious goals toward achieving AGI, and the ongoing global race for technological supremacy driven by China’s rising AI capabilities.
The documentary explores the rise of Deepseek, a Chinese AI company founded by billionaire Liang Wenfeng, which has rapidly gained global attention with its open and affordable language models. Unlike Western giants like OpenAI, Deepseek released its models openly, showcasing their thought processes and reasoning capabilities, which sparked both excitement and concern worldwide. The release of Deepseek R1 in early 2025 marked a significant breakthrough, demonstrating that Chinese AI could compete with Western counterparts in performance, cost, and transparency, challenging the prevailing narrative that only Western tech giants could lead in AI development.
Liang Wenfeng’s background is central to understanding Deepseek’s ambitions. Starting as a financial AI trader, Liang amassed wealth through a hedge fund that used machine learning to outperform markets, but his true passion was exploring general intelligence. After experiencing setbacks in finance, Liang shifted focus to AI research, founding Deepseek in 2023 with the goal of creating a truly open, innovative, and long-term AI project. His approach emphasized capability over credentials, recruiting young talent and prioritizing research and exploration over immediate commercialization, which set Deepseek apart from Western AI labs that often kept their methods secret.
Deepseek’s technological innovations are detailed, including their development of efficient training techniques like mixture of experts, group relative policy optimization, and multi-head latent attention. These advancements allowed the company to build powerful models like Deepseek R1 at a fraction of the cost of Western models, despite limited access to the most advanced chips due to US export restrictions. Their open research and focus on transparency, combined with a willingness to share their breakthroughs, positioned Deepseek as a formidable competitor. Their models also incorporated reasoning techniques like chain-of-thought prompting, pushing the boundaries of AI’s ability to perform complex tasks such as mathematics and coding.
The documentary highlights the geopolitical and economic context, emphasizing how Western restrictions on chip exports and the high costs of AI research have created a competitive race for technological supremacy. Deepseek’s rapid progress, fueled by Chinese talent and government support, challenges the assumption that China cannot innovate at the same level as the West. The company’s ability to produce high-performance, open-source models at a fraction of the cost has raised fears of a new AI arms race, with implications for global security, privacy, and technological dominance. Liang Wenfeng’s vision of China becoming a leader in AI innovation underscores the shifting landscape of global technological power.
Looking ahead, the film suggests that Deepseek’s ongoing research aims to achieve even more ambitious goals, such as infinite context models and new architectures that could lead to artificial general intelligence (AGI). Liang’s team continues to push the boundaries of AI, with the potential to open-source revolutionary models that could transform society. The documentary concludes by pondering whether Deepseek will reach AGI first, how the world will respond, and whether the Chinese company’s breakthroughs will be fully understood or exploited before the true nature of their innovations becomes apparent. The story of Deepseek is far from over, promising continued drama and competition in the AI frontier.