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By Eduardo Baptista
BEIJING (Reuters) - Quantitative hedge fund, High-Flyer, built a 100 billion yuan ($13.79 billion) portfolio using artificial intelligence models to make investment decisions, but in 2023 decided to change track to focus on developing the most cutting-edge AI.
In a post on its official WeChat account, Hangzhou Huanfang Technology Ltd Co., as the company is officially called, said it would focus on pursuing artificial general intelligence (AGI).
"High-Flyer will concentrate its resources and strength, wholly devote itself to serve AI technology that benefits all of humanity, create a new independent research group, and explore the essence of AGI," the company said.
Microsoft-backed OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT, defines AGI as autonomous systems that surpass humans in most economically valuable tasks.
It's the next generation of AI models and in a post on X last week OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said his company had not yet achieved that milestone.
The independent research group envisaged by High-Flyer was DeepSeek, whose models have rocked the global technology sector in recent weeks. High-Flyer's founder and controlling shareholder, Liang Wenfeng, doubles as DeepSeek's low-profile leader.
The sophistication of DeepSeek's models has been widely praised by its Silicon Valley competitors, a first for a Chinese AI model, but the startup's claims that it used a fraction of the computing power deployed by leading U.S. firms for their own models triggered a selloff of tech shares worldwide.
It is unclear how close DeepSeek is to developing an AGI model.
While DeepSeek's success appears to have happened almost overnight, High-Flyer shows how this meteoric rise has been over a decade in the making.
Under Liang's leadership, the fund spent years studying and experimenting with overseas AI models, applying this technology to their business, and investing tens of millions of dollars in high-end Nvidia chips to provide the computing power necessary to support this AI-centric strategy, according to a Reuters review of High-Flyer's websites and official WeChat accounts.
SUPERCOMPUTING CLUSTERS
This includes building two AI supercomputing clusters, entirely made up of Nvidia's powerful A100 chips, which Washington banned from export to China in September 2022.
High-Flyer's A100 clusters were built and put into operation long before the export controls were announced. Its first cluster, made up of 1,100 A100 chips, cost 200 million yuan and was put into operation in 2020, while its second cluster, made up of around 10,000 A100 chips, was completed a year later with a cost of 1 billion yuan, according to the company's website and several WeChat posts.