杨植麟 Yang ZhilinYang Zhilin

Born 1992 in Shantou, Guangdong. Attended Shantou Jinshan Middle School. With no prior programming background, was selected for the informatics Olympiad training program and won first prize in the Guangdong division of the National Olympiad in Informatics, earning guaranteed admission to Tsinghua University. Initially admitted to Thermal Energy Engineering, transferred to Computer Science in his sophomore year and studied under Professor Jie Tang. Graduated top of his class with a BSc (2015). Earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University in just 4 years (standard is 6), completed 2019, under Ruslan Salakhutdinov (later Apple's head of AI) and William Cohen (Google DeepMind). During his PhD, interned at Meta and Google Brain. Co-developed Transformer-XL and XLNet, extending Transformers to handle much longer sequences. Founded Moonshot AI in March 2023 with Tsinghua classmates Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. Created Kimi, one of China's most popular AI assistants, known for its industry-leading long-context capability (200K+ tokens from the start). Also an assistant professor at Tsinghua and PI at Shanghai Qizhi Research Institute. In 2026 Moonshot's open K2 / K2.5 models drove a revenue surge (sales in the first 20 days from late January topped all of 2025), and Nvidia's Jensen Huang cited Kimi K2 as a benchmark Chinese model at CES 2026. Yang was the only independent Chinese model-company founder to present at Nvidia's GTC (19 March 2026), where K2.5 debuted. Moonshot began preparing a Hong Kong IPO targeting roughly $18B, with ~RMB10B cash on hand.