Chinese startup DeepSeek AI has upended conventional wisdom about artificial intelligence (AI) innovation. Released in January 2025, the company’s R1 language model and V3 general-purpose large language model (LLM) sent tremors through markets and challenged assumptions about American technological superiority in frontier AI development.1 Although DeepSeek AI’s claims that its V3 model was trained for just $6 million have been widely disputed (experts estimate the true compute costs are closer to half a billion dollars, and DeepSeek AI itself says the cost was just for the final training run), the R1 model built on top of V3 demonstrated unprecedented reasoning capabilities and technical achievements that surpassed previous benchmarks set by US companies. 

Beneath DeepSeek’s technical achievements lies a more consequential story: the shifting patterns of global AI talent that made the company’s breakthroughs possible. This paper examines the educational backgrounds, career paths, and international mobility of more than 200 researchers who authored DeepSeek’s five foundational papers from January 2024 to February 2025. These five papers constitute the corpus of the company’s openly available research papers since its founding in 2023.

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