A DeepSeek engineer's viral post on talent, power, and humanity is a rare snapshot of work at China's frontier AI labs

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.

Liu said he does not think he will be out of work, but is worried that AI could take away the hands-on part of the job he loves, turning him from someone who writes operators himself into someone who mainly steers AI agents to do it.

He likened the shift to a talented knitter who has to give up making sweaters by hand and use a faster machine because everyone else in the trade has one too.

"But the pleasure of listening to the rain by the window, threading a needle, and slowly passing the time was ultimately crushed by the roar of the machines," Liu wrote.

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Liu, in his post, wondered if his readers felt the same way: having to engage with AI to protect their livelihoods, while knowing that things will change and take away what they like most about their work.

"I tend to keep my rational and emotional sides quite separate. When a problem calls for reason, I can be very rational. But there are times when my sentimental side comes through," Liu wrote.