# Yang Zhilin

> Yang Zhilin is the Beijing-based co-founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi. A Tsinghua and Carnegie Mellon computer scientist, he co-authored Transformer-XL and XLNet before making long context a defining feature of his startup’s AI products.

- **Role:** Co-founder and CEO at Moonshot AI
- **Organizations:** Moonshot AI, Recurrent AI, Carnegie Mellon University, Tsinghua University, Meta AI, Google Brain
- **From:** Shantou, China
- **Nationality:** Chinese
- **Education:** Bachelor’s degree in computer science, Tsinghua University, PhD in Language and Information Technology, Carnegie Mellon University
- **Known for:** Co-authored Transformer-XL and XLNet, both published in 2019., Co-authored the HotpotQA multi-hop question-answering dataset., Completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019.

## Career timeline

- **2015** — Graduated from Tsinghua University.
- **2016** — Co-founded Recurrent AI while pursuing doctoral research.
- **2018** — Co-authored the HotpotQA research paper and dataset.
- **2019** — Earned a Carnegie Mellon PhD and co-authored Transformer-XL and XLNet.
- **2023** — Co-founded Moonshot AI in Beijing; Kimi launched in October with long-text capabilities.
- **2025** — Moonshot released the open-weight Kimi K2 model.
- **2026** — Spoke at NVIDIA GTC about scaling Kimi K2.5; Moonshot released Kimi K3 and its weights.

## Achievements

- Co-authored Transformer-XL and XLNet, both published in 2019.
- Co-authored the HotpotQA multi-hop question-answering dataset.
- Completed a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University in 2019.
- Co-founded Moonshot AI and led Kimi’s long-context product strategy.
- Led Moonshot through the open-weight Kimi K2 and K3 releases.

## Latest updates

- **2026-07** — Moonshot introduced Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with native vision and a one-million-token context window, then released its weights and technical report.
- **2026-03** — Yang spoke at NVIDIA GTC about how Moonshot scaled Kimi K2.5.
- **2026-01** — Moonshot released Kimi K2.5.

## Links

- Website: https://kimiyoung.github.io/
- GitHub: https://github.com/kimiyoung

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/yang-zhilin
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-29