The legendary story of Liang Wenfeng, the founder of Deepseek and top scorer in college entrance examinations, astonishes us

Don't worry, in the wave of the AI era, heroes arise like fish crossing a river

After the release of Kimi's K3 model, it exploded all over the internet, nearing computational limits within 48 hours, and personal membership was temporarily suspended, reflecting the popularity that Deepseek once had

Kimi is currently valued at 200 billion yuan, and with K3's explosive success both domestically and internationally, there is still room for upward valuation

In June this year, Kimi's annual revenue surpassed 300 million dollars, and after the implementation of K3, revenue will achieve several times growth, with the company planned to go public in Hong Kong within half a year

According to the current growth rate, if Kimi goes public smoothly, referencing the market value of AI companies in Hong Kong, Kimi's founder Yang Zhilin is expected to become the youngest billionaire in history

And all of this starts from when he rejected Apple back in the day

Tsinghua "Genius"

Most people first learned about Yang Zhilin because of Kimi

However, before Kimi became popular, he had already accumulated many years in the AI field

Yang Zhilin was born in 1992 in Shantou, Guangdong, attended Tsinghua University for his undergraduate studies, and then went to Carnegie Mellon University for his doctorate

During his PhD, Yang Zhilin participated in research projects such as Transformer-XL and XLNet

These names may be unfamiliar to ordinary users, but they have certain influence in the field of AI research

Especially Transformer-XL, which solved problems in traditional models when processing long texts, and a few years later, long texts also became one of Kimi's earliest tags

However, Yang Zhilin chose not to remain in the academic circle; during his PhD, he began to attempt entrepreneurship

In 2016, he co-founded Recurrent AI, hoping to use AI to help companies improve efficiency

Afterward, he also joined top research teams such as Google Brain

If he had continued on this path, he could have remained in the United States and joined companies like Apple, Google, and Meta as a top AI researcher

But he ultimately chose another path, returning to China to start a business

Returning to Start a Business

In 2023, ChatGPT emerged, and the global AI competition entered a heated stage

As giants like Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent began to enter the field, Yang Zhilin chose to establish a startup — Moonshot AI

The name comes from Pink Floyd's classic album "The Dark Side of the Moon," representing the exploration of unknown territories

Compared to many companies at that time focusing on quickly launching a chatbot, Yang Zhilin chose a more challenging route: starting from the underlying model

In October 2023, Moonshot AI launched Kimi

At that time, most large models on the market were still focused on basic scenarios such as chatting and writing, whereas Kimi's differentiated capability was long text processing

It supports 200,000-word level context, allowing users to directly upload papers, research reports, and lengthy materials for AI reading and analysis

This capability quickly attracted a large number of knowledge workers

In March 2024, Kimi experienced its first surge, with a massive influx of users, and the server even experienced pressure at one point

It took Kimi only a few months to go from an internal AI product to a well-known domestically produced large model among ordinary users

Capital also began to reassess this company; having been established for less than a year, Moonshot AI completed multiple rounds of financing with a rapidly increasing valuation

In the following years, the company continued to receive capital support, and after the latest financing round in 2026, its post-investment valuation had exceeded 20 billion dollars, accumulating over 3.9 billion dollars in financing, becoming one of the largest fundraising companies among domestic large model startups

If Not for Entrepreneurship, Regret for a Lifetime

With Kimi K3's success, founder Yang Zhilin's PhD advisor at Carnegie Mellon University, Russ, was also exposed

He spoke on social media, expressing that he was honored to have taught Yang Zhilin, which led to some American patriots questioning him

They claimed he was nurturing talent for the competition, weakening American AI strength

He also revealed some details; if Yang Zhilin had been willing to stay in the U.S., he actually had many opportunities

As he had previously been the head of Apple's AI lab, leveraging that connection, Apple's CEO Tim Cook had even asked someone to inquire if Yang Zhilin was interested in joining Apple

But Yang Zhilin's response was that if he didn't independently start a business at least once, he would regret it for a lifetime

With Yang Zhilin's background at the time, if he had stayed in the U.S., he would likely have joined companies like Apple, Google, and Meta, becoming a top scientist

He would have earned a high salary, published papers, and trained models, continuously progressing in a mature research system, but it would have been challenging for him to create a model like Kimi

He himself has stated in early interviews that at large companies, scientists can decide how a technology is done, but it is difficult to determine how much computational power, funding, and talent the company commits to researching that technology

Products and business are separated into different departments, and no matter how strong a person's abilities are, they are just one link in a large machine

Another important reason is that if he had stayed in the U.S. to start a business at that time, he likewise might not have been able to secure the funds that Moonshot AI later obtained

A recent graduate without a domestic startup network in the U.S., a Chinese researcher would struggle to attract substantial funding and computational resources

While there is more money in the U.S., there aren’t as many people eligible to access that money as one might imagine; after returning to China, the situation was different

Yang Zhilin not only had a background in CMU and top AI research but also was familiar with talent, capital, and the market in China

Here, he was not just a scientist within a large company system, but one of the few who could connect technology, financing, computing power, teams, and products

If Yang Zhilin had stayed in the U.S., the world might have gained one more AI scientist in a Silicon Valley giant

His choice to return to China brought about Moonshot AI and Kimi

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