DeepSeek harnesses links with Chinese universities in talent war

The success of artificial intelligence platform DeepSeek, which was developed by a relatively young team including graduates and current students from leading Chinese universities, could encourage more students to pursue opportunities at home amid a global race for talent, experts have predicted. 

The emergence of DeepSeek upset global financial markets in January as the model appeared to rival the performance of ChatGPT and other US-designed tools, at a much lower cost.

The team behind the platform is made up of current students and recent graduates from some of China’s best-performing universities, including Tsinghua and Peking universities. 

Liang Wenfeng, the company’s chief executive, himself a graduate from Zhejiang University, has previously spoken about the benefits of hiring students from domestic universities. In an interview with Chinese media outlet 36Kr, Wenfeng described his team as “recent graduates from top universities, some PhD candidates in their fourth or fifth year, plus a few who graduated only a few years ago”.

Asked about the perception that top AI talent mostly exists outside China, he said: “The V2 model [of DeepSeek was not produced by] people returning from overseas, they are all local. The top 50 talents may not be in China, but maybe we can create such people ourselves.”

Over the past decade, the Chinese government has continuously stressed the importance of aligning university majors with advancements in science and technology, as well as better integrating academia with technological innovation and industry. 

The success of DeepSeek, which became the most downloaded app in the US shortly after its release on 20 January, suggests these policies are paying off. 

“DeepSeek’s founding team and core technical members are almost entirely products of China’s domestic higher education system, reflecting the strength of the country’s academic-industrial ecosystem,” said Marina Zhang, associate professor at the University of Technology Sydney’s Australia-China Relations Institute. 

“Many DeepSeek team members have worked on national-level AI initiatives – such as Tsinghua’s Air Lab and Peking University’s Wang Xuan Institute – where they combined cutting-edge academic research with practical industry experience. This smooth transition from lab work to product development has been central to DeepSeek’s rapid progress.”

Beijing has also emphasised the importance of self-sufficiency and embedding “Chinese characteristics” into the country’s education systems. In parallel, DeepSeek is distinctly Chinese in nature, likely shaped by its developers’ backgrounds. 

“Unlike teams that rely on overseas technological pathways, DeepSeek’s members have developed in-depth knowledge of Chinese natural language processing and multimodal understanding – capabilities that directly address AI challenges in the Chinese context,” said Zhang. “For instance, DeepSeek’s large language models outperform international competitors in tasks involving Chinese semantic understanding and classical Chinese text generation.”

However, the government is still calling for more integration as concerns about widespread graduate unemployment continue across China. In a recently released education strategy, the government reiterated calls to “set up urgently needed disciplines and majors” and increase collaboration between universities and businesses. 

China is also keen to tackle the outflow of young talent from the country, both to study and work abroad. Although the pandemic did stem the flow of students to other countries, China remains one of the top senders of students abroad. 

In some cases, these students remain abroad, particularly when there are lucrative jobs on offer. Studies suggest that, in the late 2010s, the majority of Chinese graduates who completed doctoral degrees in AI at US universities remained in the country for at least five years after graduation. 

While geopolitical tensions, including the first Trump administration’s controversial China Initiative, have contributed to the recent return of many Chinese scientists to their home country, Zhang predicted that the success of DeepSeek could inspire “more Chinese STEM graduates to pursue opportunities at home”.

“The growing evidence of high-impact careers and globally significant achievements within China’s tech ecosystem is a powerful motivator,” she continued. 

“A similar trend emerged during the first wave of internet start-ups, when top-performing graduates chose to join local tech ventures rather than seek opportunities abroad or join multinational firms. Today, DeepSeek’s story reinforces this pattern, demonstrating that China’s innovation ecosystem can rival Silicon Valley in terms of ambition, resources and impact.”

helen.packer@timeshighereducation.com