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. He graduated from Tsinghua University in 2015 and completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019. While a doctoral student he co-founded Recurrent AI in 2016, and in 2021 he led a team working on the Wu Dao large language model at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence. He co-founded Moonshot AI in March 2023 with Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, classmates from Tsinghua (Source: en.wikipedia.org). Moonshot's own profile records prior research at Google Brain as well as Carnegie Mellon (Moonshot AI).
His best-known research papers are the Transformer-XL and XLNet language-modelling papers (Source: en.wikipedia.org). XLNet ("XLNet: Generalized autoregressive pretraining for language understanding," 2019, with Zihang Dai, Yiming Yang, Jaime Carbonell, Ruslan Salakhutdinov and Quoc V. Le) is cited in OpenAI's scaling-laws paper and in "On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots".
Relationship with the Chinese state
The Economist reported in April 2026 that Yang, like MiniMax founder Yan Junjie, is not a household name but had been invited in recent months to brief Premier Li Qiang on economic issues, contrasting the low profiles of Chinese AI founders with DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng, whose handshake with Xi Jinping was broadcast by state media (Source: economist.com).
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).
On July 16, 2026 Moonshot launched Kimi K3, a sparse mixture-of-experts model of roughly 2.8 trillion parameters with native vision and a 1-million-token context window, released API-first with weights promised by July 27 (Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence (Moonshot AI, July 2026)). Moonshot told investors in August 2026 that its annual recurring revenue had passed $1 billion, up from $300 million in June, and attributed the increase to Kimi K3 (Source: bloomberg.com).
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: Kimi K3, Kimi K3: Open Frontier Intelligence (Moonshot AI, July 2026) — Moonshot's July 2026 flagship
- related: Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models, On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots: Can Language Models Be Too Big? (Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major, Shmitchell — FAccT 2021) — cite his XLNet paper
- related: Alibaba / Qwen Team (investor), Liang Wenfeng (DeepSeek counterpart), Kimi K2, Kimi K2 Technical Report, AI Sovereignty.