Luo Fuli: AI prodigy behind DeepSeek

Luo Fuli, a leading AI researcher, plays a crucial role at DeepSeek, developing advanced open-source models.

Luo Fuli, a 29-year-old AI researcher and prodigy, has become a key figure at DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company making waves in the tech world.

Known as the "Genius AI Gal" in Chinese media, Luo has earned widespread recognition for her groundbreaking contributions to natural language processing (NLP). A graduate of Peking University, Luo’s academic career skyrocketed when she published eight papers in a single year at ACL, the premier conference in NLP. This caught the attention of major tech companies, including Alibaba and Xiaomi.

One of the researchers at DeepSeek is a young woman named Luo Fuli.

Considered a kid prodigy, she graduated from Peking University, and made a name for herself at Alibaba.

Xiaomi tried to snatch her up with a $10 million offer. Nonetheless, she bet on DeepSeek and won big. pic.twitter.com/mdu0N10fIn

— Dott. Orikron 🇵🇹 (@orikron) January 27, 2025

At Alibaba, Luo worked as a researcher in the DAMO Academy, where she led the development of the multilingual pre-training model VECO and helped promote the open-source AliceMind project.

She’s Luo Fuli, a principal researcher who was one of the major developers of DeepSeek. She’s a Peking graduate. Such a cutie and brilliant mind 😊 pic.twitter.com/GDPTT4CK2R

— Yin Sun (@NiSiv4) January 27, 2025

Founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, DeepSeek is a rapidly growing AI company based in Hangzhou, Zhejiang. The company specializes in developing open-source large language models (LLMs), positioning itself as a competitor to global giants like ChatGPT.

Despite challenges such as U.S. sanctions on China limiting access to Nvidia chips, DeepSeek’s models, including its flagship DeepSeek-V2, perform on par with their more resource-heavy counterparts. In January 2025, the company’s AI chatbot app surpassed ChatGPT to become the most downloaded free app on the iOS App Store in the United States—an impressive feat that took the industry by surprise.

Luo’s expertise has been crucial to DeepSeek’s rise, especially in the development of their cutting-edge AI technologies. By choosing to join the company, Luo played a pivotal role in strengthening DeepSeek’s competitive edge, positioning it as a serious contender in the global AI race.