ISLAMABAD

Residents in southern Guangdong province warmly welcomed the founder and chief executive of Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) application, DeepSeek, during his visit to his hometown, media reports said Saturday.

Liang Wenfeng, 40, received a hero's welcome when he arrived in the village of Mililing in Zhanjiang, a port city in southern Guangdong province, for the Lunar New Year holiday, according to the South China Morning Post.

Residents held red banners while welcoming Liang as the “hometown pride.”

Liang's hometown has turned into a tourist attraction as people visit to see the village of the DeepSeek founder.

DeepSeek, which sparked a global tech sell-off earlier this week, is said to have become the most downloaded free application in the US. Investors were surprised how the low-cost, open-source generative AI tool was able to compete with leading artificial intelligence apps such as OpenAI's ChatGPT.

US President Donald Trump said the sudden rise of DeepSeek should be "a wakeup call" for America’s tech companies.

Backed by the Chinese hedge fund, High-Flyer, DeepSeek launched its DeepSeek-R1 large language model Jan. 20.

Chinese state-run media said cyberattacks on DeepSeek escalated Thursday, mostly from US IP addresses.

On Friday, South Korea also asked DeepSeek to clarify its policy on personal data collection.

It said the Korean Personal Information Protection Commission is planning to send an official probe to DeepSeek’s headquarters in Hangzhou, the capital of the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, to acquire information on the startup’s policy on personal data collection and how the data is utilized for AI training, according to Seoul-based Yonhap News.