After the release of the Kimi K3 model, it held the global top spot on the frontend development leaderboard, making Moonshot AI, this Chinese AI startup, the focus of public attention.
Russ Salakhutdinov, the Carnegie Mellon University doctoral advisor of Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin, published a post in July this year revealing some details about Yang Zhilin’s decision to return to China to start a business.
Russ Salakhutdinov said that if Yang Zhilin wanted to stay, he had many opportunities to remain in the United States. “In fact, I once discussed in an email thread with an Apple executive, a direct subordinate of Tim Cook, whether Yang Zhilin was considering joining Apple. I said that he wanted to return to his home country. The other person replied, ‘Okay, we have an office in Beijing if he wants to join Apple.’”
“But Yang Zhilin was very determined to return and start a business. I remember him telling me that if he did not at least try to start his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respect that. He was right.”
Note: Russ Salakhutdinov is a professor at Carnegie Mellon University. He was also Meta’s former vice president of research for multimodal LLMs and AI agents, as well as Apple’s former director of AI research.
Jian Ma, the Ray and Stephanie Lane Professor of Computational Biology at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science, said that several years ago, when Yang Zhilin was a doctoral student at Carnegie Mellon University, he had spoken with him several times and was impressed by his sharpness, open-mindedness, and genuine curiosity about issues outside his own fields of research, including computational biology.
