Yang Zhilin
Co-founder and CEO, Moonshot AI
A Pink Floyd devotee, he named his AI lab, Moonshot AI, after the band's album The Dark Side of the Moon.
- Born
- 1992, Shantou, Guangdong, China
- Now
- Co-founder and CEO, Moonshot AI
- Studied
- Carnegie Mellon University, Tsinghua University
Interesting facts
- Early start
Began coding in high school and won first prize in Guangdong's informatics olympiad, which earned him direct admission to university.
app001.ftchinese.com - Detour
Enrolled at Tsinghua in thermal engineering before switching to computer science, where he graduated top of his class in 2015.
ai-speakers-agency.com - Side project
Played drums in a Tsinghua campus band called Splay with future Moonshot co-founder Zhou Xinyu.
thewirechina.com - Numbers
Finished his Carnegie Mellon PhD in four years, and co-wrote the XLNet and Transformer-XL language model papers along the way.
businessinsider.com - Turning point
Apple tried to recruit him after his PhD and he could have taken a postdoc at Stanford or MIT, but he went back to China to build a company.
thewirechina.com - Connection
Goes by Kimi in English, and Moonshot's Kimi chatbot is named after him.
thewirechina.com
Career
- Moonshot AICo-founder and CEO2023 to now
- Recurrent AICo-founder2016 to now
Education
- PhD, Machine learning, Carnegie Mellon University, 2019
- BS, Computer science, Tsinghua University, 2015