- DeepSeek wants to double its workforce
- “Humanity is now on the threshold of AGI”
- US customers buy DeepSeek models
China’s DeepSeek has announced a major recruitment drive as it aims to “at least double the size of each department” as it pursues artificial general intelligence (AGI) (via South China Morning Post).
“Humanity is now on the threshold of AGI,” the company said as it aims for significant growth just three years after launching as an AI startup.
The company recently completed its first external fundraising round, securing about $7.4 billion at a valuation of more than $50 billion. About two-fifths of this was said to come from CEO Liang Wenfeng.
DeepSeek is entering a big hiring party
Conversely, OpenAI said it had a valuation of $852 billion in March.
“DeepSeek’s hiring philosophy is to let newcomers take on the most central and important tasks directly,” the firm said in a release, implying that it is not looking for “geniuses” right away.
SCMP notes that the company is hiring server-side development engineers, front-end data engineers and supercomputing cluster R&D engineers.
New product management hires also indicate that DeepSeek could be looking to build more customer-facing products and look for other commercial opportunities, marking a shift from its previous focus on research.
DeepSeek itself is in an awkward position globally, with ongoing US restrictions continuing to limit access to high-end GPUs like Nvidia’s latest generation hardware. The company already has a partnership with Chinese giant Huawei, tuning its models to run efficiently on the partner’s chips.
But global opportunities could open up for the company, with previous reporting indicating that US firms are increasingly buying DeepSeek’s models because they are more cost-effective than US alternatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.
As for the hiring, it’s likely the company will focus on its Hangzhou headquarters and Beijing R&D facility, but future expansions driven by global interest could see the company begin expanding its footprint beyond China.
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