A DeepSeek engineer's viral post on talent, power, and humanity is a rare snapshot of work at China's frontier AI labs
DeepSeek developer Liu Shengyu wrote a viral blog post about the possibility that AI could soon surpass him at the work he loves.
CN-STR / AFP via Getty Images A DeepSeek engineer says AI may soon outdo him at the work he loves most.
He worries he will keep his job but lose the part of it that gives it meaning.
His viral post offers a rare glimpse inside China's fast-moving AI scene.
A DeepSeek engineer who helped write a key component of the company's latest model has given his readers a rare insight into work at a Chinese frontier lab — and how China's workers are contending with AI's risks.
In a blog post published in Chinese on his public WeChat account titled "I Have No Choice but to Bury My Talent in Yesterday," Liu Shengyu, an AI developer at DeepSeek, reflected on the strange reality of helping build AI that could eventually make his own specialized skills obsolete.
Liu confirmed to Business Insider that he wrote the post, but declined to comment.
He wrote that, in about a year, AI had gone from a tool that could help him search documentation and spot bugs to one capable of reading GPU code and optimizing the software operators.
As much as he is "proud of the success of DeepSeek v4.1," Liu said he is "well aware" that the operators written by AI "will most likely be as good as mine, or even surpass mine." And in one particularly poignant part of the essay, Liu considers what it means to help build technology that could replace him.
Human beings have never hesitated when it comes to engineering their own destruction.
Why, then, do I still try my hardest to optimize kernels, knowing full well that the better I write them, the faster our new models can be trained and run, the faster their capabilities will advance, and the sooner I'll be replaced? Partly, it's because writing kernels feels like playing a video game to me.
I get an enormous thrill from it.
The excitement I feel when I invent a new technique, or see one of my kernels perform better, is no less intense than what a runner feels when they break their own record.
And when my kernel dramatically outperforms the hardware vendor's official version, I feel an immense sense of pride.
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