# DeepSeek puts AGI research ahead of products and commercial growth

> Source: <https://technode.com/2026/07/23/deepseek-puts-agi-research-ahead-of-products-and-commercial-growth/>
> Published: 2026-07-23 07:17:43+00:00

According to a report by [IT Home](https://www.ithome.com/0/980/367.htm), DeepSeek, the Chinese AI developer behind the open-source R1 reasoning model, is prioritizing artificial general intelligence (AGI) research over building a consumer platform or maximizing near-term revenue. The report is based on a circulated transcript of a four-hour investor meeting involving founder Liang Wenfeng.

**Why it matters: **The reported strategy presents DeepSeek as a research-led AI developer whose products and commercial services are secondary outcomes of its AGI work.

- DeepSeek’s open-source reasoning models have drawn global attention by combining strong performance with relatively low-cost development.
- Liang reportedly said DeepSeek is not focused on competing for consumer traffic, enterprise revenue, or becoming the next ByteDance or Tencent.
- The approach helps explain the company’s emphasis on open-source models, lower API prices, and improvements in training and inference efficiency.
- It also distinguishes DeepSeek from AI companies that are building standalone products and enterprise businesses around their models.

**Details:** Liang reportedly sees continual learning as the next major technical challenge after AI agents.

- He described a development path from chain-of-thought reasoning to AI agents, continual learning, and eventually embodied intelligence.
- Current AI systems generally need users to provide the relevant context again for each task. Liang reportedly believes future models should be able to learn continuously from experience.
- Coding agents are a priority because they could improve both DeepSeek’s products and its own research process.
- DeepSeek is not prioritizing 3D generation, video generation, or world models, which Liang reportedly views as useful applications but not central to the development of intelligence.
- Multimodal capabilities will still be developed for consumer and enterprise products.
- Liang reportedly said DeepSeek’s API pricing is designed to recover hardware costs in around 10 months, rather than maximize profit.
- DeepSeek also reportedly plans to keep its strongest models open source and use the same models internally and externally, rather than release weaker versions to the public.

**Context:** DeepSeek’s public profile has been shaped by its open-source and low-cost approach, but the reported comments suggest that the company still sees itself primarily as an AI research organization.

- Consumer products, enterprise services, and API revenue are reportedly intended to support the company’s longer-term technical goals.
- The comments offer a view into how DeepSeek may be positioning itself as the AI industry shifts from model releases toward agents and systems that can assist with AI research.