China’s baby-faced billionaire sends global markets into panic - AOL
Yang Zhilin, the 34-year-old Chinese entrepreneur rocking the AI world to its foundations, is often described as “baby-faced”.
Yet the youthful-looking entrepreneur behind a powerful new AI bot, known as Kimi K3, has the musical taste of a man many years his senior.
Yang is a devotee of British 1970s rock bands Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd. Fittingly, the Chinese language name of his company, Moonshot AI, translates as Dark Side of the Moon, after the Pink Floyd album released almost 20 years before his birth.
It is not his only homage to prog-rock, as Yang suggested to one Chinese technology journalist two years ago. “We may be the earliest to explore the dark side of the Moon,” he said of its AI technology.
Certainly, the company’s latest AI breakthrough has achieved a veritable “moonshot”.
Demand for Kimi K3 has outstripped the start-up’s ability to keep up. It has been praised by researchers and rivals, and attracted comparisons to the top models from US labs OpenAI and Anthropic in terms of its processing power.
It has also up-ended perceptions of where the AI revolution is going, and who is at its vanguard.
Moonshot’s AI has been billed as cheaper than the technology being launched by Silicon Valley’s labs, such as Anthropic’s Fable and OpenAI’s ChatGPT.
The AI is also “open source”, meaning it can be freely downloaded and adapted by other businesses.
Fears that Moonshot’s new AI could undercut Silicon Valley has already unleashed a rout across global technology stocks as it shifts in front of investors’ eyes.
Kimi K3 also has geopolitical observers reassessing how much longer the US can still claim technological supremacy over a rising China.
Yet surprisingly little has been written about Yang himself.
In one rare video of the technology entrepreneur, addressing a conference for chipmaker Nvidia. Yang sets out his lofty ambitions.
“We believe in democratising intelligence, with open models you can deploy anywhere … to make intelligence more accessible to anybody in the world,” he says.
But for the rest of his 40-minute talk, he sticks safely to the technical realm. He speaks fluent if heavily accented English, but not for the layman’s consumption.
He may be wise to moderate his views. Other tech billionaires in China have found, to their cost, that the Communist Party likes its economic champions on a short leash.
If Yang speaks his mind, he could be cast out like Jack Ma, the founder of Alibaba, who was barely seen for three years after a 2020 speech criticising China’s financial regulations.
Jack Ma criticised China’s financial regulation in 2020 - VCG via Getty Images
And if he courts excessive foreign funding, he risks being reined in like the founders of AI firm Manus, which earlier this year had its attempted sale to Facebook-owner Meta blocked by Beijing.
Born in 1992 in Shantou, in China’s industrial heartland of Guangdong, Yang grew up in one of China’s original Special Economic Zones.
By the time Yang was born, it was a global manufacturing centre for plastic toys.
In high school, Yang won a local Olympiad prize for informatics in a province whose population is almost that of Britain and France combined.
Yang Zhilin was born in 1992 in Shantou, China’s industrial heartland of Guangdong - iStockphoto
Inevitably, he ended up at Tsinghua University, alma mater of president Xi Jinping and the top tertiary institution in China.
A Chinese media profile claims he took both the national university entrance exam and Tsinghua’s own test, even though his Olympiad results guaranteed him entry. “I wanted to prove I could,” he reportedly said.
He enrolled in thermal engineering, but shifted to computer science in his second year.
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‘He is absolutely brilliant’At university, the rock-loving Yang played in a band called Splay, named for a term from computer science: the Splay tree.
From there he won a scholarship to Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in 2015, studying under AI gurus Ruslan Salakhutdinov and William Cohen.
“I’ve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang … was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant,” Salakhutdinov posted on X last week.
Jian Ma, another CMU professor, described Yang this week as “sharp, open-minded and genuinely curious”.
While studying, Yang did stints at Google and Meta, but eschewed US job offers to return to China.
“Zhilin was quite determined to go back and build a startup. I remember him telling me that if he didn’t at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life,” Salakhutdinov said on X.
Yet by that time, Yang was getting started in business. While still at CMU in 2016, he founded Recurrent AI, which used the tech to help retailers analyse their verbal sales interactions with customers.
Recurrent AI taught him how to woo investors and scale a business, but he learned more painful lessons, too.
After Yang founded Moonshot in 2023, some of the investors in Recurrent AI said he had not obtained all the waivers required from his old business before moving to his new one.
Yang claimed he had “gone through all the necessary formalities”. But he was hauled before the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre, where a settlement was reached.
Meanwhile, he and some of his Tsinghua friends were developing Kimi, a so-called “large language model”, inspired by a desire to make an unlocked, Chinese-first version of ChatGPT.
In an interview with Xiaojun Zhang, a Chinese technology journalist, in 2024, Yang stated his goal with AI was not just about inventing a new product, but an attempt to “change the world over the next 10 to 20 years”.
Two years later, Moonshot’s technology sent ripples through financial markets, knocking hundreds of billions of dollars from some of the world’s most valuable AI and chip companies last Friday.
Yang Zhilin founded Moonshot in 2023 - Xu Kangping/Feature China/Future Publishing
Yet Yang’s lab is grappling with the challenges of its overnight success.
Days after launching Kimi K3, an overwhelmed Moonshot on Monday said it had been forced to suspend new subscriptions, with its technology infrastructure struggling to keep up with processing requests.
“Kimi K3 has received far more love than we expected,” the company said in a post on X. “Over the past 48 hours, demand has pushed close to the limits of our current capacity.
“To protect the experience of existing subscribers, we’re temporarily pausing new subscriptions and prioritising compute for current members.”
The problems are unlikely to derail plans for a listing on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, potentially by the end of the year. There are estimates that Moonshot is already worth $30bn (£22.3bn), which would hand Yang a stake worth billions.
But the company’s struggle to secure enough chip capacity has highlighted a potential opportunity for the Trump administration to try and hold back Beijing’s bid for AI supremacy.
“If we stop China from buying, smuggling, or remotely accessing AI chips, it will be harder for them to either make advanced AI models or serve them at scale,” said Chris McGuire, of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Dean Ball, the head of strategic futures at OpenAI, wrote last week the US would probably hold back from banning Chinese open-source AI models domestically, but could try to deter businesses from using them.
However, he also warned Beijing’s decision to push cut-price open-source technology could ultimately yield “full AI communism” and a “dystopian hellscape” where AI is provided by the state.
With Moonshot already speeding towards a geopolitical storm, Yang’s ability to remain in the shadow is finally being put to the test.