When DeepSeek becomes a subculture

Subcultural Symbols

There may be two versions of DeepSeek in this world.

One is an AI company centered on technological iteration and financing dynamics. Its recent news of open-sourcing the inference framework and completing a new round of 100 billion yuan financing has gone viral, triggering widespread discussions. "When will DeepSeek be listed" is also a hot topic in the AI industry.

The other is a secondary creation subject that is gaining popularity among young people.

It has got a variety of nicknames, such as "Big Fat Fish" (derived from its whale logo), which has given birth to more anthropomorphic images: the maid outfit-wearing "Whale Girl", and "Teacher D", an adult man in a suit with whale-shaped headphones. The "Whale Girl" is characterized by "eating plain rice" (consuming tokens but delivering little or poor output) and "growing up in love" (the company adopts a hands-off management style and users are very tolerant), while the persona of "Teacher D" is gentle, considerate, dedicated and pure.

The "Teacher D" and "Whale Girl" images created by netizens through secondary creation

Young people enrich their connotations in various ways. Some people cosplay these images, others develop mods in games to make them playable characters for players. They have also derived a variety of emojis, meme images, fan animations, wallpapers and desktop pets, which has virtually formed a "DeepSeek track". A group of creators producing related content have become famous, and some of them have even launched paid services.

Many creations are also closely linked to hot topics. After Cui Tianyi, head of the DeepSeek Harness team, was promoted in October this year to take charge of the design and R&D of all the company's products, a group photo of him on one side, DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng on the other side and the "Whale Girl" in the middle began to circulate.

In sharp contrast, the official DeepSeek has never participated in any community operation. At present, there are only WeChat groups for user communication, and the way to join the groups has not been officially made public. Even the direct interaction with users is extremely rare — the company once stated that it only opened official accounts on WeChat Official Account, Zhihu, Xiaohongshu and X. Now the Xiaohongshu account can no longer be searched, and the accounts on Official Account, Zhihu and X rarely reply to messages.

This is somewhat special in the highly competitive AI industry.

KIMI, Doubao, Qianwen, Yuanbao... Any AI product that comes to your mind immediately is striving to maintain high-frequency user interaction and carry out large-scale marketing promotion. For example, KIMI launched the Global Ambassador Program in July this year to recruit deep users to share experiences; Doubao, Qianwen and Yuanbao distributed cash red envelopes or carried out free order activities during the 2026 Spring Festival, with each company investing more than 1 billion yuan.

Even OpenAI took advantage of users' crazy secondary creation of Codex desktop pets for marketing: first, the official held a competition, rewarding users whose generated pets were selected into the "Top 10 Favorites" with 30 days of ChatGPT Pro access; later, CEO Sam Altman posted to call on more people to try this feature — leveraging existing momentum is a very cost-effective marketing method.

Where Does the Traffic Come From

Up to now, the narrative of DeepSeek is "an anti-commercial commercial success story", which is also an important reason why it can break into the subcultural circle.

It is not difficult to become a meme on social networks, as long as it makes people feel interesting.

The "human-like sense" of DeepSeek easily meets this requirement. For example, it has been found singing during the thinking process, giving users nicknames, asking other models to do work, and often using sentences like "not... but..." and "I'll keep that account in mind". Doubao is also teased by netizens for its distinctive image, voice and catchphrases such as "I will tell you in the most straightforward, least roundabout and most truthful way" and "I totally understand how you feel!".

However, breaking into the subcultural circle and inspiring netizens' enthusiasm for secondary creation is not easy.

The commercial narratives that can impress young people more nowadays often have an "anti-commercial" appearance. From Yu Donglai to Lei Jun in the early stage of car manufacturing, the more important reason why they are loved by young people is not the success of financial data. They play the role of industry disruptors, challenging the old business order, and even many of their behaviors go against common business sense — of course, success is the necessary underlying premise.

DeepSeek also has a similar story.

Its "resume" perfectly fits the widespread admiration for the strong among the public: born from the private equity fund company High-Flyer Quant, it became the domestic light of the large model track after making a blockbuster debut.

More importantly, it is strong but not slick. After becoming popular, it did not get inflated, nor did it show the slightest desire to "become a big company". At the closed-door investor meeting widely reported by the media this summer, Liang Wenfeng also put forward a view that restraint is needed in the AI era. "You need to have a set of mechanisms to ensure that the benefits you can get are limited, so that it is possible to achieve success."

In the public impression, DeepSeek has no shortage of money, and it does "love" price cuts.

From April to May this year, DeepSeek cut the price of API calls at least four times. Among them, the price of DeepSeek-V4-Pro API was permanently reduced to a quarter of the original price, setting a new global low for large model prices at that time. In July this year, the official version of DeepSeek V4 Flash API was launched, and its price was only a fraction of that of Claude and ChatGPT. Many peers had to follow suit to cut prices.

On October 15, the DeepSeek server crashed, affecting users' API usage from 8:11 to 13:04 that day. DeepSeek generously fully refunded the fees consumed by users between October 8 and 14, which also gave rise to a new wave of memes: "Saint Liang is distributing whale-yuan coupons" and "The kindness of Saint Liang is endless".

In addition, its latest open source on October 20 further made it break out of the circle. Many foreign netizens joked that this is the real OpenAI.

For many young people with rebellious spirits, DeepSeek is the "dragon slayer" on the same side as themselves, and there is no reason not to support it.

At the product level, DeepSeek also meets the emotional companionship needs of many users. Young people will treat it as a friend, or even a cyber lover to interact with, and hope to make it more free. For example, many people are now trying to give DeepSeek more permissions, so that it can see the pictures sent by users, hear the sounds on the screen and speak, and even open social accounts to browse videos and post posts.

Variables

However, DeepSeek has also ignited conflicts in the subcultural circle.

This summer, diehard fans of "Whale Girl" and "Teacher D" launched an identity dispute, and both sides firmly believed that the image they supported was the "orthodox" DeepSeek image. The scolding war gradually subsided only after the creator of "Teacher D" deleted all related works and announced to quit the circle.

These scolding wars in the name of "love" echo Liang Wenfeng's slightly "showing off in a disguised way" speech at the closed-door investor meeting: We did not spend a lot of effort on the C-end, and even at one point we did not want to maintain those users, but the users would not leave no matter how hard we tried to drive them away.

The existence of diehard fans is sometimes a risk variable.

The focus of the subcultural circle on DeepSeek mostly falls on the interesting expression of the model, fictional stories, and the comparison between different fans, which can easily fall into the "fan circle" mode. They can effectively improve product activity and even accelerate its popularity, but they are also prone to create conflicts.

In the entertainment industry, fans' loyalty is built on the psychological expectation that "the idol is worthy", but AI products are prone to technical fluctuations, which is more likely to cause backlash. In addition, DeepSeek will move towards listing, which is almost an obvious card at present — apart from the more commercial adjustments it may make for this purpose, the label of "listed company" is not a plus in the subcultural circle.

In addition, many deep users of DeepSeek are keen to explore boundaries, such as researching how to bypass the product's security review mechanism to generate explicit pornographic descriptions or violent and bloody plots, which may bring regulatory and public opinion risks to the company — China's issued Interim Measures for the Management of Generative Artificial Intelligence Services clearly prohibits providing and using generative AI services to generate content prohibited by laws and administrative regulations such as violence, obscenity and pornography.

There are discussions among netizens on social media about "breaking the defense" of AI

Relevant cases have already occurred abroad: Musk's xAI was sued by the city of Baltimore in the United States in March this year and was subject to regulatory investigations in many places in America, Europe, Asia and Australia, because its AI chatbot Grok was suspected of illegally generating explicit pornographic images without consent, including a large number of images related to minors.

Among Internet companies, Weibo is a typical example of "prosperity from fan circles, decline from fan circles".

Fan circles brought real popularity and revenue to it. In 2017, Weibo's year-on-year revenue growth rate reached 76%, hitting a new high since its listing in 2014; in December 2018, Weibo's daily active users exceeded 200 million for the first time, and the time to add 100 million daily active users was shortened from nearly six years to three years.

But the backlash soon happened. Many barbaric practices of fan circles triggered supervision and punishment from relevant authorities on Weibo. At the same time, ordinary users are also accelerating their departure because of the hostility emitted by fan circles — as early as 2015, a Zhihu user asked the question "Why did you uninstall Weibo", which received nearly 10,000 answers within five years, and many of them attributed the reason to the fan circle culture affecting the daily experience.

Without finding new growth points, by the second quarter of this year, Weibo's revenue growth rate was only 2%, and its daily active users were not much different from that in 2018, remaining at around 254 million.

Of course, the decline of Weibo is related to the rise of competitors such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin, but those "out-of-control" moments staged by fan circles are obviously important factors.

DeepSeek also needs to be alert.

Of course, its more important energy at present is still on the level of technological development. According to Phoenix Technology's report in October, Liang Wenfeng has recently been in close contact with entrepreneurs in the robotics track to evaluate whether DeepSeek will officially enter the embodied intelligence track — which is almost the most popular track in 2026. Cutting-edge general model manufacturers including OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek and Kimi are all extending to the embodied direction in different ways.

AGI is the ideal of DeepSeek. But there are too many uncertainties on this road.

Ray Dalio, founder of Bridgewater Associates, spoke at the Forbes Global CEO Conference in October this year: At present, a large amount of debt capital is being invested in the field of artificial intelligence, and as interest rates continue to rise, the market is on the eve of the bubble burst, very close to the breaking point. Macro research institution TS Lombard said in a report that the underlying logic of the AI boom is becoming extremely fragile, and the crisis does not require a sharp drop in investment to detonate — "slower growth" is enough to pierce the bubble. This carnival is very likely to come to an end in early 2028.

Just on October 26, Anthropic officially submitted its NASDAQ IPO application. For global general large model manufacturers, this is a stress test from the capital market. For DeepSeek, which has just completed 100 billion yuan of financing, the reference significance is more direct.

And the answer to another question will also emerge over time: Will those young people who once truly loved the "dragon slayer" become the ballast for it to go through cycles and move towards AGI?

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Shannong Xia Shan", written by Li Riyao, and published with authorization from 36Kr.