Yang Zhilin

Yang Zhilin (born 1992) is one of the youngest founders at the frontier of Chinese AI. A Tsinghua graduate with a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, he was first author of Transformer-XL and XLNet — two of the most-cited NLP papers of the pre-ChatGPT era — and worked at Google Brain and Meta AI before returning to Beijing.

Racing toward long-context AGI

Yang founded Moonshot AI in March 2023, and its Kimi chatbot broke out by reading documents of extraordinary length — the technical thesis being that memory and context, not just raw scale, are what stand between chatbots and AGI. Backed by Alibaba and others at a multi-billion-dollar valuation, Moonshot became one of China’s so-called “AI tigers,” and Yang has said he wants to fuse OpenAI’s technological idealism with ByteDance’s business discipline. In 2025 the lab pivoted hard into open source, releasing the trillion-parameter Kimi K2 family, which briefly topped global open-model leaderboards.

The ride has not been smooth: Moonshot burned cash on a marketing war with rivals, lost ground when Liang Wenfeng’s DeepSeek reset the market in early 2025, and Yang faced arbitration claims from investors in his previous startup over how Moonshot was spun up. He has kept the lab pointed at the long game, arguing that AGI is the only prize worth playing for over the next decade.