❯ Liang Wenfeng tells investors DeepSeek is training a 2-trillion-parameter model and eyeing 8 trillion

the closed-door meetingPer people familiar with the matter, DeepSeek held an in-person closed-door meeting on Sunday, requiring investors to attend at its Beijing or Hangzhou offices while CEO Liang Wenfeng joined remotely. He said the company is training a 2-trillion-parameter model, larger than its current 1.4-trillion-parameter V4 flagship, and plans to develop an 8-trillion-parameter model.

leak-proofingThe confidentiality measures were unusual: investors had to surrender electronic devices and bags, with only pen and paper provided for notes. The background is that a previous investor meeting with Liang, running about 3 hours and 44 minutes, leaked in full while DeepSeek was at a sensitive point in fundraising, and its second round was briefly paused as a result. Per earlier reporting, the company closed its first external round of about $7.4 billion in June, with the second round valuing it around 500 billion yuan.

from efficiency to scaleDeepSeek’s calling card had been building equivalent models on less compute; 2 trillion and 8 trillion say it is joining the parameter race. Read alongside Alibaba’s 5- to 10-trillion target on the same day, the dimension Chinese frontier labs compete on is shifting from training efficiency to absolute scale. The real pressure point is the pace of domestic compute supply — an 8-trillion-parameter training run clearly cannot be carried on the roughly 20,000 H-series-equivalent GPUs it has had, which explains why most of its fundraising has gone toward building its own data centers.

▪ SIGNALThe lab famous for saving compute is now quoting trillions of parameters; Chinese model competition has switched its unit from efficiency to scale.