Yang Zhilin: 34-year-old Chinese founder's Kimi K3 model catches Silicon Valley's eye

A new founder is making waves in the AI industry — and he's not an American tech billionaire like Elon Musk, Sam Altman, or Dario Amodei.

Yang Zhilin, a 34-year-old researcher and entrepreneur, leads the Chinese company Moonshot AI and its newly released open-weight model, Kimi K3, which captured 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 — at a much lower cost — marking a new milestone for China in the global AI race.

Who Is Yang Zhilin?

Born in 1992 in Shantou, a city in China's Guangdong province, Yang attended Tsinghua University before earning a Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in Pennsylvania. There, 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 noted that after graduation, Yang was heavily recruited by Big Tech but remained committed to starting his own company.

While at Carnegie Mellon, Yang interned at Google Brain and Meta. He has 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
• Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence's Wu Dao, a large-scale multimodal AI model
• Recurrent AI, a startup he cofounded that used AI to analyze sales conversations and help companies improve performance

Yang's Philosophy on AI

One of Yang's core 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.

Moonshot AI and the Rise of Kimi K3

Yang helped start Moonshot AI in early 2023. The team behind the company developed multiple AI technologies, including:

• Transformer-XL
• RoPE
• Group Normalization
• ShuffleNet
• MuonClip
• 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. The company also offers 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.

With the release of Kimi K3, both Moonshot AI and its founder have been catapulted onto the global stage.

Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, said on X that Kimi K3 marked "the first time that an open model is ahead of all proprietary ones for this comprehensive web engineering benchmark."

Ethan Mollick, a Wharton professor, called it "closest to the frontier yet."

Yang himself has ambitious long-term goals:

"The ultimate AGI company will dwarf today's giants — double, triple the scale. Not necessarily OpenAI, but such a company will exist," he said in his interview with Zhang.

Why Yang Zhilin Left the US

Some leading tech figures lamented after Kimi K3's release that Yang did not remain in the United States to work at an American AI lab.

Vinod Khosla, the legendary billionaire investor, 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.
• 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.
• 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.

However, Salakhutdinov said that while the US immigration process can be intimidating and "uncertain," Yang was always set on returning to China to build 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.