Zhilin Yang

Yang Zhilin is an AI researcher and entrepreneur who left the United States after completing his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University to found Moonshot AI in China, the startup behind the Kimi family of large language models, whose open-weight Kimi K3 model sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley upon its 2026 release.

Yang studied at Tsinghua University before earning his PhD at Carnegie Mellon under prominent AI researchers William Cohen and Ruslan Salakhutdinov. During his doctoral studies he interned at Google Brain and Meta and co-authored research with leading AI scientists including Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, Google researcher Quoc V. Le, and Turing Award laureate Yoshua Bengio. Despite recruitment interest from major US technology companies following graduation, the 34-year-old rock music enthusiast chose to return to China to build his own company. Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weight model designed for complex reasoning, software coding, and long-document analysis, has intensified debate in the US over the retention of AI talent, following a 2024 Stanford survey in which 73% of Chinese-American scientists reported feeling "unsafe" as academic researchers.