'Humanity now stands on the eve of AGI': DeepSeek wants to "at least double the size of every department" as company pursues hiring spree in pursuit of AGI

• DeepSeek wants to double its workforce
• "Humanity now stands on the eve of AGI"
• American customers are buying DeepSeek models

China's DeepSeek has announced a major recruitment campaign as it sets out to "at least double the size of every department" as it pursues artificial general intelligence (AGI) (via the South China Morning Post).

"Humanity now stands on the eve of AGI," the company said, as it targets significant growth just three years after it launched as an AI startup.

The company recently completed its first external fundraising round, securing around $7.4 billion at a valuation of more than $50 billion. Around two-fifths of that was said to have come from CEO Liang Wenfeng.

DeepSeek enters major hiring spree

Conversely, OpenAI said it had a valuation of $852 billion in March.

"DeepSeek’s hiring philosophy is to let newcomers take on the most core and important tasks directly," the firm said in an announcement, implying it's not seeking "geniuses" immediately.

SCMP notes that the company is hiring for server-side development engineers, pre-training data engineers and supercomputing cluster R&D engineers.

New product management hires also indicate that DeepSeek could be looking to build more customer-facing products and look for other commercial opportunities, marking a shift from its earlier focus on research.

DeepSeek itself is in an awkward position globally, with ongoing US restrictions continuing to limit access to advanced GPUs like Nvidia's latest-generation hardware. The company already has a partnership with fellow Chinese giant Huawei, and is tuning its models to run efficiently on its partner's chips.

But global opportunities could be opening up for the company, with earlier reporting indicating that US firms are increasingly buying DeepSeek's models because they're more cost-effective than US alternatives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and others.

As for the hires, it's likely that the company will focus on its Hangzhou headquarters and Beijing R&D facility, but future expansions driven by global interest could see the company start to expand its footprint beyond China.