They fit their era.
Author: Rao Fuying, Deep Web Tencent News
Image source: Generated by Boundless AI
Behind the bustling activity of Deepseek during the entire Spring Festival is a group of "enigmatic talents" (as described by Jack Clark, former policy director of OpenAI).
DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng provided a rough profile of this group of employees in an interview with 36Kr: "They are mostly recent graduates from top universities, doctoral interns who haven't graduated yet, and some young people who graduated just a few years ago. In the current AI circle, having a prestigious education and high qualifications has become the norm.
The "2024 Report on the Portrait of AI Entrepreneurs in China" shows that AI entrepreneurs are characterized by high education levels and youth, with over 70% holding a master's degree or higher, coming from more than 400 universities worldwide, with Tsinghua University and Peking University leading the way.
Moreover, the post-95 generation in the AI field stands at the center stage. The "Global AI Talent Tracking Survey Report" released by the McKinsey Global Institute in 2024 pointed out that among more than 30 notable Chinese AI startups in the U.S., post-95 entrepreneurs account for half, including "genius girl" Guo Wenjing and Alexander Wang, who is valued at over $1 billion.
In China, key developers of DeepSeek-V2, such as Luo Fuli, CTO of Mianbi Intelligent, and Jiang Yuchen, founder of Waveform Intelligence, are also post-95.
"The post-95 population in the labor force is about 200 million (ages 17-29). They grew up in an era of rapid economic growth, living in abundance, and are more inclined to balance work development and enjoying life," the "2024 China Urban Talent Attraction Ranking" report states.
It is evident that the reason post-95 individuals can become the backbone of the large model wave and step into the spotlight is not coincidental; it is closely related to the tide of the times and personal choices.
Genius Youths Under the Spotlight
Data from iMedia Research shows that the market size of China's AI large model sector reached approximately 29.416 billion yuan in 2024, and it is expected to exceed 70 billion yuan by 2026, demonstrating strong growth momentum.
The 2024 "Government Work Report" proposed the launch of the "Artificial Intelligence +" initiative, emphasizing the importance of AI in the digital economy and accelerating the achievement of high-level technological self-reliance. Large models and AI are currently the star tracks, and the entrants in the past two years have come at the right time.
As is well known, AI is a high-threshold industry, and entrants need absolute "hard power." Looking at the young people who have stepped into the spotlight of the AI large model circle in recent years, most have impressive educational backgrounds and strong technical capabilities.
Recently, Luo Fuli, who was poached by Xiaomi with a multi-million salary, has become a star in the large model circle. She graduated with a degree in computer science from Beijing Normal University and later pursued her master's at the Institute of Computer Language Research at Peking University.
After graduating with her master's, Luo Fuli joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy Machine Intelligence Lab through the "Ali Star Project," where she was responsible for the AliceMind open-source project and led the development of the multilingual pre-training model VECO. The "Ali Star Project" is the highest level of recruitment at Alibaba, with an average acceptance rate of less than 1% and fewer than 20 people admitted each year. In Alibaba's promotion, "every Ali Star is a talent selected from a hundred."
As early as 2019, Luo Fuli made headlines for publishing eight top journal papers (including two as the first author) within a year, and her proposed word sense disambiguation method and text style transfer framework advanced the development of NLP technology.
In 2022, Luo Fuli left Alibaba to join Huanfang Quantitative, engaging in deep learning-related strategy modeling and algorithm research. She then moved to DeepSeek as a deep learning researcher, participating in the development of DeepSeek-V2.
Luo Fuli's rise to fame is attributed to both the opportunities of the era and her strong professional capabilities. Another "genius girl" is Guo Wenjing, the founder of Pika. She attended the competition class at Hangzhou No. 2 High School, and her mother, Guo Xiaoli, is a graduate of MIT, while her father, Guo Huaqing, is the actual controller of Zhejiang Xindaya Company.
In her first year of high school, Guo Wenjing won first prize in the National Youth Informatics Olympiad (Zhejiang Province). She later participated in the American National Olympiad in Informatics for two consecutive years, winning the championship each time.
In 2016, Guo Wenjing became the first student in Zhejiang Province to be admitted early to Harvard University. During her PhD studies at Stanford University, she found that various AI products on the market were overly complicated to use, so she resolutely decided to drop out of Stanford and founded Pika Labs, aiming to create an AI tool that simplifies video creation.
Silicon Valley investors took notice, and within a year, Pika completed its Series B financing, raising a total of $135 million, with the company's valuation doubling to $470 million. Six months after the company's founding, Guo Wenjing launched Pika 1.0, allowing users to generate and edit 3D animations, cartoons, and films with "zero threshold."
The product became an instant hit in the domestic and international tech circles, and Guo Wenjing's father's company, Xindaya, also gained popularity—hitting six consecutive daily limit-ups in just eight days, with a total market value reaching 8.3 billion yuan, setting a new high. The company even issued a statement clarifying that it had not invested in Pika, and the story of "the daughter elevating the father" became a topic of conversation.
Not only Luo Fuli and Guo Wenjing, but also many genius youths in the AI circle. Zeng Guoyang, who self-taught programming at the age of eight and was a math Olympiad champion, was admitted to Tsinghua University through recommendation and was once hailed as a "genius boy" by the public.
During university, Zeng Guoyang joined Tsinghua University's NLP (Natural Language Processing) lab, becoming one of the earliest researchers in large models, later joining the Wudao·Wenyuan Chinese Pre-training Model team as a key member. In 2020, he was a main contributor to the development of China's first Chinese large model, CPM-1, which sparked industry discussions.
After graduation, he co-founded Mianbi Intelligent with his mentor Liu Zhiyuan, serving as CTO at the age of 24. In May 2024, Zeng Guoyang led his team to develop the model "MiniCPM," which was praised in the industry as a "performance powerhouse."
They Fit Their Era
Not only these already famous post-95s, but also new faces are continuously emerging in the AI-related entrepreneurial field.
Jiang Yuchen, founder of Waveform Intelligence, is a post-95 who is a PhD student in AI at ETH Zurich. Her company, founded less than a year ago, developed the Weaver-driven web literature AI writing product "Wawa Writing." Within a year of its launch, the product has over 300,000 registered users, generating nearly 20 billion words of text, with paid users averaging over six hours of daily usage.
Another rising star in the 3D large model field is Song Yachen, born in 1998, who graduated from Johns Hopkins University. He worked at SenseTime and MiniMax before founding the 3D large model company VAST at just 25 years old. Within a year and a half, VAST became a leading company in the field, capturing over 70% of the market share.
Photon computing chip company Guangbenwei was also co-founded by two post-95s. One of the founders, Xiong Yijiang, is a master's graduate in computational science from the University of Chicago, while the other co-founder, Cheng Tangsheng, holds a PhD from the University of Oxford. Their entrepreneurial direction focuses on AI computing chips, serving AI inference and training scenarios in the era of large models.
Not only domestically, but globally, there is a trend of post-95 academic elites becoming the backbone. The once sensational AI company Scale AI became a myth in the industry due to its seven rounds of financing and a valuation of over $100 billion. Its leader, Alexander Wang, born in 1997, started programming at the age of five, entered MIT at 18, and dropped out during his freshman summer to found Scale AI.
Today, Scale AI has become a global leader in AI data services. Alexander Wang himself has made it onto the list of the wealthiest people under 30 globally, becoming one of Silicon Valley's youngest entrepreneurial giants. At just 27 years old, his net worth has exceeded $1 billion, with some even calling him "the next Musk."
The post-95 generation is described as a confident, optimistic, creative, and daring generation that challenges norms. They are willing to express their thoughts and pursuits, do not blindly follow, emphasize individual differences, and pursue a personalized lifestyle. As "digital natives," post-95s have been exposed to the information society early, advocate for new technologies, and possess keen insights and creativity.
LinkedIn conducted a survey of thousands of professionals from different generations in first-tier and "new first-tier" cities, finding that post-95s are more accepting of emerging industries than those from the 80s and 90s, especially in high-tech fields, including big data, cloud computing, AI, and robotics.
An AI headhunter told "AI Lightyear" that from the recruitment situation, corporate demand is concentrated in a few universities with relevant laboratories, where doctoral students are more sought after. This headhunter believes that there is an urgent need for algorithm pre-training talent in China, and most companies will recruit directly from core laboratories. Currently, most of the AI laboratories established are in top domestic universities.
However, "education is just a stepping stone; ability is the real guarantee." As a high-threshold industry, education and intelligence may only be the first step. DeepSeek's hiring philosophy aligns with this, as founder Liang Wenfeng stated to 36Kr that the main members of the DeepSeek team are recent graduates from top universities and doctoral students who have not yet graduated. In addition to academic background, DeepSeek also places great importance on candidates' competition results and innovation.
Both Luo Fuli and Zeng Guoyang have publicly stated that they prefer challenging tasks and dislike monotonous, repetitive work, as remaining in a comfort zone for too long means little growth.
Zhang Peng, founder of Zhipu AI, told "AI Lightyear" that he mainly focuses on two aspects when hiring: learning ability and innovative thinking. "The starting point is important, but it only represents past accumulation; future growth potential depends on learning ability." Zhang revealed that during interviews, he assesses candidates' speed and quality of information mastery in both technical and business fields.
The future is here, and the post-95s who have already stepped into the spotlight of AI will create more new possibilities.
免责声明：本文章仅代表作者个人观点，不代表本平台的立场和观点。本文章仅供信息分享，不构成对任何人的任何投资建议。用户与作者之间的任何争议，与本平台无关。如网页中刊载的文章或图片涉及侵权，请提供相关的权利证明和身份证明发送邮件到support@aicoin.com，本平台相关工作人员将会进行核查。
