AGI at all cost, Nvidia is digging its own grave: DeepSeek CEO just declared war on Silicon Valley

Published 24 July 2026 · tech

It is not common to see Chinese tech pioneers express their thoughts publicly. But that is exactly what DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng has done, giving

It is not common to see Chinese tech pioneers express their thoughts publicly. But that is exactly what DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng has done, giving us a glimpse of the person behind one of China’s leading AI labs. You see, unlike OpenAI CEO Sam Altman or Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Liang Wenfeng does not care about revenue or profit. The DeepSeek chief says that he has only one goal – artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a state where AI can start thinking like humans. Read Full Story Recently, a record of a nearly four-hour exchange between Liang Wenfeng DeepSeek’s investors was made public. In the discussion, Liang set out his view of DeepSeek’s purpose, and almost declared war on Silicon Valley, not only in the race for powerful AI models, but also when it comes to advanced AI chips. No IPO, DeepSeek doing this for goodwill At a time when OpenAI and Anthropic are planning to go public at trillion-dollar valuations, Liang Wenfeng dismissed the idea of an IPO for DeepSeek. He says that he never cared about making money. “Our original intention was not that I ultimately wanted to make a certain amount of money, to go to the capital markets, to IPO, or anything like that. So we didn’t have that original intention,” the DeepSeek CEO said. So much so, that the DeepSeek chief labelled revenue as “sesame seeds” that he is not too concerned about picking up. He said, “The sesame seeds in front, we’ll pick some up, but we just pick up a bit casually – we won’t stop, or treat it as an important matter.” Instead, Liang Wenfeng had eyes on the “watermelons” that may be there in the future. Rather than money, Liang believes that DeepSeek exists to be useful for humanity, something which he says is far more important than money.

He explained,"So overall, we’re doing this with tremendous goodwill toward the world, and then we feel this is useful for humanity—this is something beyond money." Do note that OpenAI, which started as a non-profit, turned into a for-profit organisation last year, though its non-profit arm retains a 26 per cent stake. Liang Wenfeng insisted that any large company needs a vision to stick to, but this doesn’t come simply by words said by its leaders. Rather, a vision is only realised by the way a company operates. "What is vision? Vision is not a slogan hanging on the wall—vision is how you do things, not how you talk, that is, how you actually operate,” he added. AGI is the goal As AI labs in the US chase enterprise users in hopes of getting returns on their investments, Liang Wenfeng says that there is just one goal for DeepSeek – AGI. He explained, "Then next is the company’s long-term vision – I think our goal should be AGI.” He acknowledged that the definition of AGI differed depending on who you ask. “Everyone’s definition of AI isn’t necessarily the same, but that doesn’t stop us from treating AGI as our goal,” the DeepSeek CEO said. According to Liang, AI’s development is like a “staircase” that progresses gradually. That is one advancement can help reach the next step. He explained, “Why is it a staircase? Because each subsequent step is based on the previous foundation. Agent uses CoT (chain of thought), and CoT also uses the previous step, which is the language model – so no step is wasted.” That is, with time, Liang Wenfeng says, that AI agents too will develop further, and we will reach the next step, and eventually progress towards AGI. Once an AI system could learn continuously, he said, it would reach singularity.