DeepSeek engineer Liu Shengyu, who wrote v4.1’s main attention kernels, said he wrote his widely circulated AI essay “not to express anxiety about unemployment, but to say goodbye to the time I spent writing kernels by hand.” In a clarification on Zhihu, he said AI already works faster than he does, pushing him to use agents rather than spend working hours manually writing and optimizing GPU kernels.

In the original essay, “I Have No Choice but to Bury My Talent in Yesterday,” Liu estimated that AI could match or surpass the quality of his kernels within six months to a year. He said he will continue developing kernels and incorporating AI agents, and remains relatively optimistic about his place in the workforce. His concern is whether he can continue doing work that is also a hobby; he suggested programming by hand could eventually become recreation rather than productive work.

Liu also clarified that the essay’s closing remarks about communism, Cyberpunk 2077 and access to powerful AI were personal reflections, not DeepSeek’s position or his central argument. He said discussion of Anthropic and DeepSeek had overshadowed the essay’s main subject, while reaffirming his belief that frontier AI should be available to everyone openly and affordably.