There’s a founder making waves in the AI industry that’s not an American tech billionaire like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Dario Amodei.
Yang Zhilin is the 34-year-old researcher and entrepreneur behind the Chinese company Moonshot AI and its new open-weight Kimi K3 AI model, which seized Silicon Valley’s attention this week.
Kimi K3 is the latest buzzy open-weight model from China. Its coding and agentic capabilities rival those of leading American models from labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and come at a much lower cost, marking a new milestone for China in the AI race.
Who is Yang Zhilin?
Yang was born in 1992 in Shantou, a city in China’s Guangdong province. He attended Tsinghua University before earning a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania, where he studied under prominent AI researchers Ruslan Salakhutdinov and William Cohen.
“He is absolutely brilliant,” Salakhutdinov said of Yang in a post on X on Friday. In another post, Salakhutdinov said that after his graduation, Yang was heavily recruited by Big Tech but was committed to starting his own company.
While at Carnegie Mellon, Yang interned at Google Brain and Meta. He’s also coauthored several research papers on topics ranging from limitations in how language models handle context to prompt-tuning advice.
Before launching Moonshot AI, Yang returned to China and contributed to several major AI projects, including Huawei’s PanGu model and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence’s Wu Dao, a large-scale multimodal AI model. He also cofounded Recurrent AI, a startup that used artificial intelligence to analyze sales conversations and help companies improve their performance.
One of Yang’s principles in building AI is to lean toward scale.
“If you can solve it with scale, don’t solve it with a new algorithm. The new algorithm’s value is to enable better scaling,” he told journalist Xiaojun Zhang in an interview published on LinkedIn.
He helped start Moonshot AI in early 2023. The team behind the company had developed multiple AI technologies, including Transformer-XL, RoPE, Group Normalization, ShuffleNet, MuonClip, and Mooncake.
Moonshot AI’s first claim to fame was giving its Kimi K2 foundation model an unusually large context window — a trillion parameters — to process lengthy documents. Moonshot also has an AI assistant product, Kimi, and has since expanded into coding, research, and autonomous AI agents, attracting backing from Alibaba, Tencent, and other major Chinese investors.
Kimi K3 has now catapulted both Moonshot AI and its founder onto the global stage.
Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch said Kimi K3 marked “the first time that an open model is ahead of all proprietary ones for this comprehensive web engineering benchmark,” in a post on X. While Wharton professor Ethan Mollick called it “closest to the frontier yet.”
“The ultimate AGI company will dwarf today’s giants — double, triple the scale. Not necessarily OpenAI, but such a company will exist,” Yang said in his interview with Zhang.
Why Yan Zhilin left the US
Some leading tech figures lamented after Kimi K3’s release this week that Yang didn’t remain in the United States to work at an American AI lab. Legendary billionaire investor Vinod Khosla blamed the Trump administration’s restrictive immigration policies.
“Even bigger issue is the brilliant talent we are scaring away from other countries with our immigration policies for great talent,” he said in response to the news of Kimi K3’s success.
The Trump administration has moved to tighten immigration restrictions, including for student visas. Last year, the government introduced a $100,000 fee for employers sponsoring some new H-1B applications for foreign workers. The ruling was later struck down by a federal judge and remains in litigation.
Then, in May, a US Citizenship and Immigration Services memo implied that people who could previously apply for a green card from inside the US may now have to leave the country while their case is being processed.
And this week, the administration introduced a new rule that puts an expiration date on how long people on student visas can initially stay in the US.
Salakhutdinov, however, said that while the US immigration process can be intimidating and “uncertain,” Yang was always set on going back to China and building his own startup.
“I remember him telling me that if he didn’t at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respect that, and he was right,” Salakhutdinov wrote on X.
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