Founder and CEO of Moonshot AI
The founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, the company behind the Kimi models, and a co-author of XLNet and Transformer-XL.
Yang Zhilin, also known as Kimi, is the founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, the Chinese AI company behind the Kimi assistant and models. He enrolled at Tsinghua University in 2011, moving from thermal energy engineering to computer science in his second year, and completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in four years, defending his thesis in August 2019, co-advised by Ruslan Salakhutdinov and William W. Cohen. He interned extensively at Google and also worked at Facebook AI Research (Meta) before returning to China.
As a researcher he was first author of XLNet, which outperformed BERT on 20 NLP benchmarks at launch, and co-developed Transformer-XL for handling longer text sequences. He founded Moonshot AI on 1 March 2023 with Tsinghua schoolmates Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. Kimi launched with long-context processing of about 200,000 Chinese characters per prompt, Moonshot open-sourced Kimi K2 in July 2025, and in 2026 the company released the open-source Kimi K3. According to CNBC and Bloomberg, as reported by The National, Moonshot raised $2 billion at a valuation above $20 billion in May 2026.
Founded Moonshot AI on 1 March 2023 with Tsinghua schoolmates Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin; the company makes the Kimi assistant and models.
Co-developed XLNet as first author; it outperformed BERT on 20 NLP benchmarks at launch.
Co-developed Transformer-XL, an architecture for handling longer text sequences.
Moonshot open-sourced Kimi K2 in July 2025 under his leadership.