Employee of China’s OpenAI and Anthropic rival, DeepSeek, writes a ‘sentimental letter’ on AI; says: Human beings have never hesitated when it comes to engineering their own destruction

A DeepSeek engineer has offered a rare and deeply personal look at what it feels like to build increasingly powerful AI while knowing that the same technology could eventually make parts of his own job obsolete. In a sentimental letter published on his public WeChat account, China’s OpenAI and Anthropic rival – DeepSeek AI developer Liu Shengyu reflected on how quickly AI has changed his work. He said that within about a year, AI moved from helping him search documents and find bugs to reading GPU code and optimising software operators. Liu, who helped write a key component of DeepSeek’s latest model, said he is proud of DeepSeek v4.1 but also knows that AI-written operators could match or even surpass his work.