Why the US is losing Chinese AI stars
More entrepreneurs from China believe there are now greater opportunities at home than in Silicon Valley.
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Beijing-based Moonshot last week released Kimi K3, a large language model that has been ranked alongside flagship offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic.
PHOTO: AFP
Zijing Wu
In 2019, Moonshot AI’s founder Yang Zhilin completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in just four years – about two fewer than the standard. Apple wanted him. Google and Meta had already hosted him as an intern. Postdoctoral doors at Stanford and MIT stood open. He chose none of them. He returned to China.
His CMU supervisor, Russ Salakhutdinov, later recalled Yang’s reasoning: “If he didn’t at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life.”
