- DeepSeek wants to double its workforce
- “Humanity is now on the eve of AGI”
- US customers are buying DeepSeek models
China’s DeepSeek has announced a major recruiting drive aiming to “at least double the size of each department” in its pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI) (via the South China Morning Post).
“Humanity is now on the eve of AGI,” the company said, as it targets significant growth just three years after launching as an AI startup.
The company recently completed its first round of external fundraising, raising around $7.4 billion at a valuation of over $50 billion. About two-fifths of that amount was said to have come from CEO Liang Wenfeng.
DeepSeek enters a major hiring wave
By contrast, OpenAI said it had a valuation of $852 billion in March.
“DeepSeek’s hiring philosophy is to allow newcomers to directly take on the most central and important tasks,” the company said in an announcement, implying that it is not immediately looking for “geniuses.”
SCMP notes that the company is hiring server-side development engineers, pre-trained data engineers, and supercomputing cluster R&D engineers.
The new product management hires also indicate that DeepSeek may be looking to create more customer-facing products and pursue other business opportunities, marking a shift from its previous focus on research.
DeepSeek itself finds itself in an awkward position globally, as current restrictions in the US continue to limit access to advanced GPUs like Nvidia’s next-generation hardware. The company already has a partnership with Chinese giant Huawei and is fine-tuning its models to work efficiently with its partner’s chips.
But global opportunities could be opening up for the company, as previous reports indicate that US companies are increasingly buying DeepSeek’s models because they are more profitable than US alternatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.
In terms of hiring, the company will likely focus on its Hangzhou headquarters and its research and development facility in Beijing, but future expansions driven by global interest could see the company begin to expand its presence beyond China.
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