> quant HFT is pretty decent mental exercise and it has given them “deep” brain muscles. that’s my take.

It's quite crazy that it's Deepseek's background/original purpose. We already had very advanced stuff from the world of HFT, but now a frontier family of models from a private company that used to be (still is?) in HFT is plain bonkers.

Is more known about them and the HFT background?

According to an old interview, apparently they were always interested in AI. But finance is just where they had their first success.

> Many of High-Flyer's original team members worked on AI. Back then, we tried a lot of fields before getting our big break in finance, which is complex enough. AGI is probably one of the hardest things we can do next, so for us it was a question of how, not why.

It's a very good interview:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/kANyEjDDFWkhSKbcK/two-interv...

Incidentally, Wenfeng is kind of reverse Hassabis. There were some rumours that:

> Hassabis quietly assembled a team of around 20 researchers to develop high-frequency trading algorithms, without Google's approval. When the parent company found out, the project was disbanded.

https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/technology/tech-news/whe...

In this case the finance model was used to parse lengthy, verbose and inscrutable yet very impactful chinese government pr statements and do sentiment analysis.