When DeepSeek’s breakthrough AI model took the tech world by storm earlier this year, its success was partly credited to a small but exceptionally talented team that managed to build advanced AI technology with limited resources — and among them, Luo stood out.
As one of the key developers behind the open-source foundation model DeepSeek-V2, she earned recognition from industry experts for her pioneering work in natural language processing, as reported by NDTV.
Behind her achievements at DeepSeek lies years of persistence and discovery that began in her student years.
Luo Fuli. Photo from X
Born in 1995 in Yibin, China’s Sichuan, Luo studied at a local community library for much of her childhood. She went on to attend Beijing Normal University, where she initially found computer science difficult but eventually graduated with top honors.
Her journey continued at the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University, where she published eight papers at China’s ACL conference in 2019. Her accomplishment drew attention from major tech firms including Alibaba and Xiaomi.
After earning her master’s degree at Peking, Luo joined Alibaba’s DAMO Academy to conduct research on pre-trained language models. She led the development of the multilingual pre-training model VECO and contributed to the open-source AliceMind project.
In 2022, she joined High-Flyer and later moved to DeepSeek, where she became a deep learning researcher known for her key role in developing the V2 model.
According to Chinese media, Luo’s teammates at DeepSeek also came from top local universities such as Tsinghua University and Peking University.
The firm is known for its unique hiring strategy, which seeks out young and inexperienced instead of seasoned veterans, per Fortune.
Its founder, Liang Wenfeng, told Chinese media outlet 36Kr in an interview last year that: “The top 50 talents may not be in China, but maybe we can create such people ourselves.
“Innovation first requires confidence. This confidence is usually more obvious in young people,” he added.
During her time at DeepSeek, Luo’s exceptional skills caught the attention of Xiaomi founder Lei Jun, who reportedly offered her a position at his company with an annual salary of 10 million yuan (US$1.4 million), according to the South China Morning Post.
It was unclear whether she accepted the offer, though a later report by The Standard cited her relative as saying she had left DeepSeek without disclosing her new employer.
The researcher herself shared on Wechat in February that the wave of praise following her rise to prominence had been overwhelming.
She admitted that such acclaim often brings tremendous pressure and leave her feeling helpless due to the social media buzz. The intense public attention, she said, has also made it harder for her to stay focused on her work.
She also dismissed the “genius” label, claiming that she “is not a genius and just wants to do difficult but right things.”