DeepSeek’s founder reportedly laid out an AGI roadmap — and a long “not now” list. What do you make of Liang Wenfeng’s views on where AI should go next?

A transcript attributed to DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng from a closed-door investor meeting has been circulating widely in Chinese tech media. What stood out to me was not just Liang’s reported view of the next generation of AI, but how that roadmap appears to explain DeepSeek’s long list of things it does not currently want to prioritize. His reported roadmap was roughly: Chain-of-thought reasoning → agents → continual learning → AI self-improvement → embodied intelligence The central argument is that current models can perform increasingly complex work when given enough context, but they do not accumulate experience over time in the way humans do. From this perspective, improvements in cost, speed and model performance are not enough to define a genuinely new generation of models. The next major breakthrough would be continual learning. If models can learn continuously, they could then help accelerate AI research and contribute to developing their own successors. Embodied intelligence—AI entering and acting in the physical world—would come later. This roadmap also seems to explain DeepSeek’s current priorities: Coding agents come first, followed by general-purpose agents. Vertical agents for finance, healthcare and other industries have lower priority for now. Continual learning is treated as the next major bottleneck after agents. Scaling still matters. DeepSeek reportedly sees limited compute resources—not the end of scaling itself—as a major constraint. Multimodality matters for products and users, but is viewed as a component rather than the central path toward intelligence. 3D generation, video generation and world models are not considered part of DeepSeek’s current critical path. Consumer products, enterprise products, user growth and commercialization are not being abandoned, but they are not supposed to determine the company’s research direction. The one organizational priority described as non-negotiable was maintaining team stability. The logic appears to be: if continual learning is the main bottleneck on the path toward AGI, putting too much research attention into product polish, vertical applications, video generation or maximizing user growth could reduce the probability of solving that bottleneck. What do you make of Liang Wenfeng’s views on where AI should go next—and the priorities DeepSeek is setting around them? Source note: Daily Economic News reported that an institution involved in DeepSeek’s financing confirmed the May 2026 meeting and considered the circulated account credible. Yicai also obtained a transcript, but reported that DeepSeek had not responded to its request for confirmation. The points above are therefore paraphrases from media reporting, not official quotations.