Luo Fuli: The AI Prodigy Behind DeepSeek’s Success
DeepSeek's groundbreaking AI model made waves in the tech industry earlier this year, with its success attributed to a small, talented team that developed advanced AI technology with limited resources. Among them, Luo Fuli stood out.
As a key developer of the open-source foundation model DeepSeek-V2, she gained recognition from industry experts for her pioneering work in natural language processing, as reported by NDTV.
Behind her achievements at DeepSeek are years of persistence and discovery that began during her student years. Born in 1995 in Yibin, Sichuan, China, she spent much of her childhood studying at a local community library. She later attended Beijing Normal University, initially finding computer science challenging but eventually graduating with top honors.
Her journey continued at the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University, where she published eight papers at China's ACL conference in 2019. Her accomplishments drew attention from major tech firms, including Alibaba and Xiaomi.
After earning her master's degree at Peking, Luo joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy to conduct research on pre-trained language models. She led the development of the multilingual pre-training model VECO and contributed to the open-source AliceMind project.
In 2022, she joined High-Flyer and later moved to DeepSeek, where she became known for her key role in developing the V2 model. According to Chinese media, her teammates at DeepSeek also hailed from top local universities such as Tsinghua University and Peking University.
The firm is recognized for its unique hiring strategy, which seeks out young and inexperienced individuals rather than seasoned veterans. Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, stated in an interview with Chinese media outlet 36Kr last year, "The top 50 talents may not be in China, but maybe we can create such people ourselves."
During her time at DeepSeek, Luo's exceptional skills caught the attention of Xiaomi founder Lei Jun, who reportedly offered her a position at his company with an annual salary of 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million), according to the South China Morning Post. It remains unclear whether she accepted the offer, although a later report by The Standard cited her relative as saying she had left DeepSeek without disclosing her new employer.
The researcher herself shared on Wechat in February that the wave of praise following her rise to prominence had been overwhelming. She admitted that such acclaim often brings tremendous pressure and leaves her feeling helpless due to the social media buzz. She also dismissed the "genius" label, claiming that she "is not a genius and just wants to do difficult but right things."