China's "Huawei genius" Li Bojie calls out DeepSeek's absurd interview: still accused of copying code in the second round

Former Huawei "Genius Youth" program selectee, PhD from University of Science and Technology of China, and current Chief Scientist at Pine AI, Li Bojie, publicly criticized DeepSeek's interview process on July 6, stating that his interview wasn't scheduled for half a month, the first two rounds forced him to write code, and in the second round he was suspected of plagiarism. DeepSeek has yet to officially comment. Content sourced from Li Bojie's (@bojie_li) own social media post.

(Background: How to get an interview opportunity at Anthropic? Five rounds of interviews plus a "cultural interrogation like psychological counseling")

(Context: Two major scientists leave Google DeepMind, stock price drops 7%, Demis Hassabis fires back)

Key Summary

• Former Huawei genius youth Li Bojie publicly criticizes DeepSeek's interview process as absurd, claiming that during the second round, the interviewer suspected him of glancing at another screen to copy code, leading him to angrily terminate the interview on the spot.
• This is his unilateral account. DeepSeek has yet to officially comment. On Zhihu, some netizens echoed that it was the worst interview they had ever experienced.
• He later added a follow-up post in his own community, revealing his desire to join "a company with a foundation model." The contrast between his criticism and his eagerness to enter such a company sparked heated discussion.

A post that was originally just a complaint about an interview garnered nearly 270,000 views within two days. The author is Li Bojie, a computer PhD from the University of Science and Technology of China, a former member of Huawei's first batch of "Genius Youth" program, and currently the Chief Scientist at Pine AI, a voice assistant startup. On July 6, he launched a scathing critique of DeepSeek's interview process in English on social media, every sentence dripping with sarcasm.

A rant about DeepSeek's interview process. First, after passing the written test, they didn't schedule an interview for half a month. By then, offers from other companies had already come through. Only after repeated prodding did they finally schedule the interview. When I…

— Bojie Li (@bojie_li) July 6, 2026

His account: After passing the written test, DeepSeek failed to schedule an interview for a full half month, dragging things out until offers from other companies had already come in. Only after several reminders did they finally arrange it. He said that in his interviews with other companies, he had never encountered a coding interview (a hands-on programming test), but DeepSeek not only required a written test but also had coding interviews in the first two rounds—an arrangement he had never seen at any other company.

Suspected of Copying Code, He Walked Out on the Spot

What really made him flip out was the second round. He said the interviewer couldn't understand what he was talking about, thought all his descriptions were research problems (academic, pre-implementation research questions), and kept pressing him about "what exactly are the engineering challenges" (specific engineering difficulties).

When it came to the coding interview, he was using two monitors. The interviewer noticed him glancing at the left screen and directly accused him of copying code, saying that if he couldn't prove he wasn't cheating, the interview couldn't continue. Li Bojie said this offense was so egregious that he decided on the spot to terminate the process and publicly exposed the matter, asking for it to be shared.

The above is solely Li Bojie's unilateral account. No interviewer or employee from DeepSeek has come forward to confront his claims, and the company has not yet issued any official response.

Chinese media added that the interviewer for the second round was late themselves, and their attitude seemed flippant. In a Zhihu discussion thread, some users commented that they had also interviewed with DeepSeek and called it the worst, most disrespectful interview experience of their lives, saying "the filter shattered." For a company with a big name, having its interview process repeatedly criticized by its own applicants and netizens, DeepSeek has chosen to remain silent this time.

Writing Papers Is Not as Good as Writing Mini-Essays

After the rant blew up, Li Bojie was woken up in the middle of the night and realized that this complaint post had more reach than his carefully written IKP paper. He joked:

Writing papers is not as good as writing mini-essays.

A flood of private messages came in from people concerned about him. He responded uniformly, saying that Pine's product is growing well and the company is operating normally. He also clarified that some reports had misidentified him as the founder of Pine, which he said was incorrect—he is merely the Chief Scientist.

He said that since the beginning of this year, he has felt very similar to Andrej Karpathy: working on models and harnesses (the external training and evaluation toolchain for models) outside of "foundation model companies" (companies that train large language models from scratch, like DeepSeek, OpenAI, etc.) means missing out on a ton of know-how—for example, how to build training data, or how to read a model's "internal metrics" (observational indicators of the model's internal health).

He does not deny the value of application layers, vertical models (models fine-tuned for specific scenarios), or world models. It's just that external teams trying to figure things out on their own can hardly gather all the tricks, because each company guards these nuances as trade secrets.

So he decided that his next move would be to join a company with a foundation model, to work on "intelligence ceilings" (pushing the frontier of model capabilities). He also mentioned that in the past month, with the help of Pine's voice assistant and Claude Code, he has been writing up research ideas he previously didn't have time to pursue into papers.

FAQ

Who is Li Bojie?

Li Bojie is a computer PhD from the University of Science and Technology of China, a former member of Huawei's first batch of "Genius Youth" program, and currently the Chief Scientist at voice assistant startup Pine AI. He is not the company's founder.

Has DeepSeek responded?

As of now, DeepSeek has not issued any official response or had any employee come forward to address Li Bojie's accusations, nor have they provided any explanation or comment on the interview process controversy.