YANG Zhilin (杨植麟)
Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI
AI is not about what PMF I find in the next year or two, but how to change the world in the next ten to twenty years.
For us, it's about exploring the unknown. Just like AGI, you usually only see the illuminated side of the moon, but the dark side remains mysterious. It's challenging, yet full of potential. That aligns with our mission.
A truly great company needs cultural depth—it's not just about technology or a soulless product. The soul comes from underlying values.
I witnessed a massive shift. AI has developed over 70 years, but never before has there been such a breakthrough. Previously, AI companies focused on B2B. But since last year, applications like GPT have emerged, reaching non-technical users. Hitting 100 million users was a clear signal.
YANG Zhilin (杨植麟, born 1992) is the founder and CEO of Moonshot AI (月之暗面), the Beijing-based startup behind the Kimi large language model family. Founded in April 2023, Moonshot AI was valued around $3.3 billion in late 2024 and later reportedly raised $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation in May 2026, backed by investors including Alibaba, Tencent, and Sequoia China/HongShan.
Yang earned his bachelor's degree from Tsinghua University (2015, top of his CS class) and completed his Ph.D. at Carnegie Mellon University in under four years, advised by Ruslan Salakhutdinov. He has published over 20 influential AI papers and co-authored XLNet (cited over 10,000 times) with Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun.
He previously worked at Google Brain and Meta AI Research. In July 2025, Moonshot AI released and open-sourced Kimi K2, China's first open-source trillion-parameter model.
