DeepSeek’s Wenfeng Liang says restraint, open source, and low cost are the path to AGI

FinanceYF5 · x · 2026-07-26

DeepSeek founder Wenfeng Liang says restraint is the strategy

In a four-hour investor meeting, Liang repeatedly returned to restraint: he does not want to chase user growth, rush monetization, build the next super-app, or follow every hot trend. In his view, the near-term opportunities are often just “seeds,” while larger “watermelons” still lie farther ahead.

He frames DeepSeek as a company focused on AGI first, with products treated as byproducts of that goal. The meeting transcript also says the company does not want to become the next Tencent or ByteDance; instead, it cares most about the next technical breakthrough. Open source, low prices, and not optimizing for immediate profit are presented as ways to increase the odds of reaching AGI.

Open source: the public model should match the internal version, not a degraded release.
Commercialization: it will happen, but not with profit maximization as the goal.
Competition: future model rivalry will hinge first on cost, then speed, and only then user experience.
Roadmap: the main path is CoT → Agent → continuous learning → self-improving AI → embodied intelligence.
Priorities: DeepSeek says the most important focus now is coding agents and general agents; 3D, video generation, and world models are not the core.

The transcript also argues that the missing ingredient in AI is not taste or intuition, but continuous learning. Once models can help build better next-generation models, the field can enter an acceleration phase toward self-improvement and, eventually, embodiment.

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DeepSeek’s Wenfeng Liang says restraint, open source, and low cost are the path to AGI

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