Meet Yang Zhilin, the CEO and founder behind China's buzzy new Kimi K3 AI model
Yang Zhilin, a 34-year-old Chinese researcher and entrepreneur, is the CEO and founder of Moonshot AI, which developed the Kimi K3 open-weight AI model. The model has seized Silicon Valley's attention for its coding and agentic capabilities that rival leading American models like those from OpenAI and Anthropic, but at a much lower cost. Yang, born in Shantou, China, earned a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University under prominent AI researchers and interned at Google Brain and Meta. He returned to China to contribute to major AI projects including Huawei's PanGu model before launching Moonshot AI in early 2023. The company's Kimi K3 model has been praised by tech figures like Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and Wharton professor Ethan Mollick. The article also discusses why Yang left the US, with some blaming restrictive US immigration policies under the Trump administration, though his advisor noted Yang was always determined to return to China to start his own company.
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