Globally, a company’s employees’ resumés collectively reflect its overall talent pool, industry focus, career development opportunities, culture, and commitment to hiring diverse and qualified individuals; providing insight into the workforce it cultivates and the valued skills.
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI startup firm that has sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley with its recent release of cutting-edge AI models.
Developed with remarkable efficiency and offered as open-source resources, these models challenge the dominance of established players like OpenAI, Google and Meta.
DeepSeek’s innovative techniques, cost-efficient solutions and optimisation strategies have had an undeniable effect on the AI landscape.
Speaking about DeepSeek’s resume, DaiWW on his official X handle @BeijingDai stated, “I have looked at the resumes of Deepseek’s R&D team members, most of whom are every young and under 30 years old. They come from top universities in China and some of them are still PhD students. They have one thing in common, none of them have any academic or work background from overseas.”
This once again demonstrates that China has caught up with the United States in the quality of university education, and China will have an absolute quantitative advantage in STEM graduates in the coming decades.
Chinese hedge-fund manager Liang Wenfeng is behind DeepSeek’s development. The business grew out of the AI research unit of his $8 billion hedge-fund firm, High-Flyer.
Liang Wenfeng, a prominent figure in both the hedge fund and AI industries founded DeepSeek in 2023. Wenfeng’s multifaceted background has significantly shaped DeepSeek’s trajectory.
Wenfeng’s academic foundation in AI at Zhejiang University has been instrumental in DeepSeek’s technological advancements. While specific research contributions are not publicly available, his background in artificial intelligence research has enabled the company to develop cutting-edge AI models and applications.
Read also: DeepSeek AI is a wake-up call for America — Trump
Leadership under Wenfeng prioritises innovation over hierarchy, implementing a talent-first strategy. In the past year, DeepSeek has hired 150 AI graduates, with 70 percent coming from top-tier universities and 85 percent having prior internship experience in the AI field.
Of these new hires, 60 percent were placed in research and development roles, while the remaining 40 percent were distributed across various departments such as product development, data analysis, and customer support.
This approach sets DeepSeek apart from some competitors by focusing on nurturing young, innovative minds rather than relying solely on experienced professionals.
While comparative data on innovation and productivity between DeepSeek and other leading AI companies is not available, DeepSeek’s strategy has enabled rapid advancements in various AI domains.
What Nigerian employers can learn
This is obviously opposite to what many employers of labour in Nigeria hold as their resumés. In Nigeria one frustrating cycle is that employers demand several years of experience for jobs that are supposed to offer a starting point for young graduates, while internships, which are often unpaid, require qualifications that many simply cannot afford.
As a result, Nigeria’s youth struggle to gain the experience needed to secure full-time employment, worsening the unemployment crisis. Unemployment, especially among young people, has reached alarming levels in Nigeria, creating a significant socio-economic challenge.
In the Nigerian job market, entry-level positions often come with unreasonable expectations. Many companies advertise roles that are meant to provide young graduates with their first job experience, yet demand 2-5 years of prior work experience.
This paradox creates an impossible situation: young people are expected to have experience they haven’t had the opportunity to acquire.
Read also: US tech stocks slump on Deepseek’s emergence
The role of native language
Besides, DeepSeek leverages a deep understanding of Chinese language and culture to enhance AI developments. This focus has led to improvements in natural language processing capabilities for Chinese language applications, including more accurate translation, nuanced sentiment analysis, and context-aware conversational agents.
The company’s expertise in Chinese culture allows for the development of AI systems that can better interpret cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions, and context-specific meanings, leading to more natural and culturally appropriate AI interactions for Chinese users.
This invariably is a pointer to the fact that Nigeria’s education policymakers and implementers should begin to integrate local languages into learning even at tertiary institutions level.
Integrating local languages into learning provides several benefits, including deeper cultural understanding, improved engagement with the learning material, enhanced communication with the local community, increased access to information, boosted confidence, and potentially better academic performance by allowing students to connect learning to their everyday lives and cultural context; it can also lead to improved job prospects in the local area.
Research and development focus
DeepSeek also fosters a culture of innovation with a focus on research and development. The company embraces open-source principles, promoting a collaborative environment and has made significant contributions to the open-source community, with 15 repositories on GitHub, 1200 commits, and 50 contributors.
These repositories have facilitated collaboration, innovation, and the democratization of AI technology, enabling researchers and developers to build upon existing work and accelerate progress in the field.
The availability of these resources has contributed to the advancement of AI applications across various industries, particularly in natural language processing, understanding, and generation for the Chinese language.