Yang Zhilin is the founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, a Chinese frontier-AI developer behind the Kimi model family. He is described as one of the leading figures in China's wave of open-weight frontier development following DeepSeek.
Background
Yang researched at Carnegie Mellon and Tsinghua before founding Moonshot AI in 2023.
Roles and technical work
As founder and CEO, Yang leads Moonshot AI and the development of its Kimi models. Kimi K2, released in July 2025, is a one-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model with 32 billion active parameters and was state-of-the-art among open-weight models at release (Kimi K2 Technical Report). Its successor, Kimi K2.5, released in January 2026, focused on agentic coding (Kimi K2).
The Kimi K2 technical report documents Moonshot's MuonClip optimizer and agentic data synthesis methods, which have been among the most cited non-Western frontier research contributions of 2025.
Backing
Alibaba is a principal investor in Moonshot AI, part of Alibaba's broader Chinese frontier-AI portfolio alongside its in-house Qwen models (Alibaba / Qwen Team).
Relationships
- leads: Moonshot AI
- related: Alibaba / Qwen Team (investor), Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek counterpart), Kimi K2, Kimi K2 Technical Report, AI Sovereignty.