Who is Yang Zhilin? Meet Moonshot AI CEO and co-founder behind viral Kimi K3 model

Earlier this week, China's Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, the most powerful open-weight model out there. This has brought all eyes onto the company's co-founder and CEO Yang Zhilin. But who is Yang Zhilin? Here is everything you need to know.Yang Zhilin co-founded Moonshot AI in 2023 (Photo: Moonshot AI)It is not everyday that a new personality shakes up the tech industry. Usually, it is dominated by a handful of tech bros from Silicon Valley, think Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, or now maybe Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. But now, Moonshot AI CEO and co-founder Yang Zhilin has been gaining attention following the release of the Kimi K3 AI model.To give you some context, Kimi K3 is the most powerful open-weight AI model out there. The AI model can even match, if not outperform the likes of Claude Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 in select benchmarks. This makes Kimi K3 a major milestone for Moonshot AI and Yang Zhilin.This puts Yang and his startup up against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic in the AI race. But while the American AI companies focus on closed AI models, Moonshot AI’s open-weight models can be downloaded and run locally, making them cheaper to use.The release of Kimi K3 was recognised as a big achievement by many in the tech world, including Yang Zhilin’s former professor Russ Salakhutdinov. He wrote on X, “Congratulations to Zhilin Yang, founder and CEO of Moonshot AI on the latest Kimi release. What a huge win for the open-source community!” Russ Salakhutdinov shared a post from 2019 when Yang Zhilin completed his PhD. Russ previously served as VP of Research for Generative AI at Meta, and before that as he was the Director of AI Research at Apple.Who is Yang Zhilin?Yang Zhilin was born in 1992 in Shantou in China's Guangdong province. He studied at Tsinghua University and later completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pennsylvania under Russ Salakhutdinov and other prominent AI researchers such as William Cohen. At CMU, Yang took only 4 years to complete his PhD while making fundamental contributions to machine learning. In a separate post, Russ called him “absolutely brilliant.”After completing his studies, Yang Zhilin worked at Google Brain and Meta, while also writing several research papers. Then, he moved back to China to work on AI projects in his home country, including Huawei's PanGu model and the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence's Wu Dao, a large-scale multimodal AI model.He also co-founded Recurrent AI, a startup that used artificial intelligence to analyse sales conversations and help companies improve performance. Describing one of his principles for building AI, Yang told Xiaojun Zhang in an interview, "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."In the same interview, Yang said, "The ultimate AGI company will dwarf today's giants – double, triple the scale. Not necessarily OpenAI, but such a company will exist."Yang 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 first drew notice with its Kimi K2 foundation model, which was built around an unusually large context window to process lengthy documents. The company 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.As per reports, Moonshot AI has raised $2 billion at a more than $20 billion valuation this year.The model's release also prompted debate over why Yang did not stay in the United States. Some leading tech figures argued that the US was pushing away talent, with Vinod Khosla saying after Kimi K3's success that a bigger issue was "the brilliant talent we are scaring away from other countries with our immigration policies for great talent.”Apple wanted to hire Yang Zhilin?Russ Salakhutdinov, however, said the immigration process could be intimidating and "uncertain", but added that Yang had always intended to return to China.At one stage, Apple was so eager to bring Yang onboard that they were willing to let him work from Beijing. He explained, “I was on an email thread with a senior Apple exec (Tim Cook's reports) asking whether Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said that he wanted to go back to his homeland. The response was, well, we have an office in Beijing if he'd like to join there.” Russ claimed that Apple was eager to hire Yang. Though Russ insisted that Yang Zhilin always wanted to build something of his own. "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," he wrote on X.- EndsPublished By: Armaan AgarwalPublished On: Jul 19, 2026 09:50 IST