What DeepSeek CEO has but we don't

Last week, the ‘DeepSeek shock’ shook global stock markets. The emergence of DeepSeek, which is based on open source, reduces investment costs by 95 percent and surpasses ChatGPT in key benchmarks (performance tests), has been dubbed a ‘Sputnik moment’ by the Western world.

The spotlight is also on DeepSeek CEO Liang Wenfeng, who led the company to success. In November last year, a lengthy interview with Liang was published on ChinaTalk, a local specialized media outlet. It captured Liang's thoughts and ambitions before he was in the spotlight. Some of the sentences in the interview remind us of what Liang has, but we don't.

“We are mostly young people who have just graduated from prestigious universities or are in PhD programs,” Liang said. As we know, DeepSeek's 150 or so employees are mainly people in their 20s and 30s. Most of them are new employees with no previous work experience. Liang explains that he has such a hiring philosophy because people with existing experience tend to think along a set path.

On the other hand, Korean companies are eliminating new hires due to long-standing labor rigidity and redundancies. According to The Dong-A Ilbo's analysis of employee age groups based on the sustainability reports of the four major conglomerates, the proportion of employees in their 20s and younger at Samsung Electronics fell below 30 percent for the first time in 2023. The rest of the group's major affiliates are already below 30 percent. Rather than seeking creativity and innovation, there is a growing reliance on hiring experienced workers at Korean conglomerates to keep the organization running.

“The best talent is most attracted to solving the world's toughest challenges.” Along with Liang Wenfeng, people are drawing attention to China's indigenous scientific talent. In addition to Liang Wenfeng himself, a math prodigy, homegrown science and technology stars like Luo Fuli, 30, who played a key role in the development of DeepSeek, and Yang Zhilin of Moonshot AI, are being constantly supplied and rewarded in the Chinese tech community. On the other hand, South Korea is in a regrettable domestic human resources landscape wherein talented students increasingly flock to medical schools due to career uncertainties in the sciences, and R&D budgets are being cut, let alone developing a long-term plan and mechanism to foster scientific talent.

“We believe that China should be a contributor, not a free rider,” Liang said. When founding DeepSeek in 2023, Liang Wenfeng envisioned a dream to ‘create human-level artificial intelligence (AI).’ He also had a grand ambition to end the free ride on Western-dominated high-tech industries and make homegrown fundamental breakthroughs in technology. In the end, an individual's dream that transcended material rewards has brought about DeepSeek's Sputnik moment. Such dreams have long been lost in Korea’s workplace culture, where the only incentive is a “salary that can't be beaten,” and people change their business cards from Samsung to SK, vice versa, or to foreign-based companies in search of better compensation and treatment.

However, there was a time when we had such a dream. There was a time when Naver founder Lee Hae-jin and Daum founder Kim Bum-soo left Samsung and started the first generation of information technology ventures. There was a time when Kim Jung-ju wrote the legendary success story of Korean online gaming from a desk in a small office. It is not that we did not have what Liang Wenfeng has now in the first place, but that we just lost at some point. The Deep Shock has made some cracks in the U.S.-led high-cost AI industry structure. We should take this as a wake-up call and use it as a spark and opportunity to revitalize Korean entrepreneurship.