Meet coder Luo Fuli, the genius AI gal behind China’s sensational DeepSeek R1

Luo Fuli, 29, is the coder behind the new DeepSeek AI chatbot sensation which has stormed the artificial intelligence space and rattled stock markets all at once. It has not just outdone ChatGPT, but it also topped the chart of the Apple app store. She is now being hailed as the “AI prodigy” and the “Genius AI gal” in China. While many credit the success of the app to Liang Wenfeng, 39, not many know about Luo and her story.

Luo was born to a family of lower means, but this did not stop her from striving for excellence. She earned a seat at Beijing Normal University, where she excelled in computer science after initial hiccups. She also studied at Peking University’s Institute of Computational Linguistics, where she presented eight papers at the ACL conference in 2019. This would be the turning point.

Her achievement at this prestigious conference caught the attention of mega-tech giants Alibaba and Xiaomi, making way for her future achievements. She was a researcher at Alibaba’s DAMO Academy where she led the multilingual pre-training model VECO and worked for the AliceMind project.

She joined DeepSeek in 2022. She is an expert in natural language processing, which played a vital role in developing DeepSeek-V2. At this time, DeepSeek was a quantitative hedge fund which used mathematical algorithms for trading.

XIAOMI FOUNDER HIRED LUO FULI ON $1.4-MILLION SALARY

After this project, Luo and her work received attention from Xiaomi’s founder, Lei Jun, who paid her a salary of 10 million yuan ($1.4 million), reported the South China Morning Post.

In 2024, Fuli published a paper with several others which gave access to DeepSeek open-source codes to help the research on the subject.

The DeepSeek team consists of college graduates, freshers and people with little work experience along with 150 Chinese researchers and engineers along with 31 data automation researchers, according to the South China Morning Post.

The most prominent members of the team are: Guo Daya, a PhD student from Sun Yat-sen University, Zhu Qihao and Dai Damai, PhD graduates from Peking University, a physics student from Peking University – Gao Huazuo, who studies AI at the Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Zeng Wangding, according to a report by South China Morning Post.

DeepSeek has currently shaken the AI space as now many reports claim it is going to outdo all other kinds of AI chatbots. While many credit its founder Wenfeng, Luo was also the genius behind the Chinese AI chatbot, which looks like it is here to stay.