PeopleofSuperintelligence

Researcher

Yao Li

Yao Li is an AI researcher whose papers connect him with DeepSeek-AI's language-model and reasoning work. He coauthored reports on DeepSeek LLM, DeepSeek-V2 and DeepSeek-V3 in 2024, then coauthored DeepSeek-R1 in 2025. The R1 work used reinforcement learning to develop reasoning behavior, appeared in Nature in 2025, and received a January 2026 revision with his name on the author list.

Timeline

  1. January 2024

    Scaling DeepSeek LLM

    In January 2024, he coauthors DeepSeek LLM, a paper on open-source language models in 7B and 67B configurations.

  2. May 2024

    DeepSeek-V2 and MoE

    In May 2024, he coauthors DeepSeek-V2, a 236B-parameter mixture-of-experts model that activates 21B parameters per token and supports a 128K context length.

  3. December 2024

    DeepSeek-V3 at scale

    In December 2024, he coauthors the DeepSeek-V3 technical report, which describes a 671B-parameter model with 37B activated parameters per token.

  4. January 2025

    Reasoning with DeepSeek-R1

    In January 2025, he coauthors the DeepSeek-R1 report, which shows how pure reinforcement learning can develop LLM reasoning abilities without human-labeled reasoning trajectories.

  5. September 2025

    DeepSeek-R1 in Nature

    The DeepSeek-R1 paper appears in Nature in September 2025, with him listed among the DeepSeek-AI Team authors in Hangzhou. The study describes reasoning behavior that emerges through pure reinforcement learning.

  6. January 2026

    Revising DeepSeek-R1

    In January 2026, the DeepSeek-R1 report receives a revised version, with Yao Li named among its authors alongside DeepSeek-AI.

  1. Google had the most people shaping AI every year from 2014 to 2025Our estimates of which organizations employed the most people shaping AI each year from 1955 to 2025, tracing the shift from university labs to companies.
  2. The United States employs an estimated 48% of people shaping AIWe estimate where the people shaping AI work today, how universities, companies and research institutes split across countries, and how country shares have changed since the 1960s.
  3. 43% of living people shaping AI work outside their country of birthWe estimate that 43% of living people shaping AI work outside their country of birth (520 of 1,198 people with known birth and employment countries).
  4. More people shaping AI studied at Massachusetts Institute of Technology than at any other institutionWe estimate where the people shaping AI studied and where their careers led. Massachusetts Institute of Technology leads with 467 former students, including 291 recorded doctorates.

Sources and credits

Photo: We have no published photo of Yao Li yet. Send us a free-licensed photo.

  1. DeepSeek LLM: Scaling Open-Source Language Models with Longtermism arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  2. DeepSeek-V2: A Strong, Economical, and Efficient Mixture-of-Experts Language Model arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  3. DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  4. DeepSeek-R1: Incentivizing Reasoning Capability in LLMs via Reinforcement Learning arxiv.org. Checked 21 October 2026.
  5. DeepSeek-R1 incentivizes reasoning in LLMs through reinforcement learning nature.com. Checked 21 October 2026.
  6. DeepSeek-R1 incentivizes reasoning in LLMs through reinforcement learning ideas.repec.org. Checked 21 October 2026.