Yang Zhilin

Yang Zhilin
杨植麟
Born1992 (age 33–34)
Shantou, Guangdong, China
Education
Known forCo-founder of Moonshot AI
Co-author of XLNet and Transformer-XL
Scientific career
FieldsArtificial intelligence
ThesisAdvances in Generative Feature Learning (2019)
Academic advisors
Chinese name
Simplified Chinese杨植麟
Traditional Chinese楊植麟
Transcriptions
Standard Mandarin
Hanyu PinyinYáng Zhílín
Yue: Cantonese
JyutpingJoeng4 Zik6 Leon4

Yang Zhilin (Chinese: 杨植麟; pinyin: Yáng Zhílín; born 1992) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman who is the co-founder of the AI company Moonshot AI. He also co-founded Recurrent AI.

Yang is also the co-author of the papers relating to XLNet and Transformer-XL.

Early life and education

Yang was born in 1992 in Shantou, Guangdong province. He once dreamt of becoming a rock star or a wandering poet. His favourite band is Pink Floyd and his favourite album is The Dark Side of the Moon.[1][2]

Yang attended Shantou Jinshan Middle School. Despite having no programming background, after one year of training he won first prize in National Olympiad in Informatics in Guangdong province which earned him admission to Tsinghua University. He then took Tsinghua University's independent entrance examination and was admitted again. He nevertheless took the Gaokao, earning a 667 — the top score in Science in Shantau — which served as a third admission ticket to Tsinghua.[1]

At Tsinghua, Yang originally majored in thermal engineering. However, after reading a novel by Haruki Murakami, Yang decided to change his major to computer science. His academic adviser was Jie Tang (co-founder of Z.ai). During his time at university, Yang formed a rock band called Splay (named after Splay tree) where he was drummer and songwriter.[2]

After graduating from Tsinghua in 2015, Yang moved to the United States to pursue his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University. He studied under Ruslan Salakhutdinov (former Apple director of AI research) and William Cohen (Google DeepMind principal scientist).[1][2][3]

During his PhD studies, Yang worked at Google Brain and Meta Platforms. He also co-authored papers on computer reasoning and pattern recognition with Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. His most notable papers authored are on XLNet and Transformer-XL.[1][3][4] In 2019, after four years, Yang obtained his PhD from CMU.[1][3]

Career

In 2016, while a PhD student, Yang co-founded Recurrent AI to develop AI-driven sales tools for businesses. It used the Transformer-XL algorithm to provide solutions.[2] After his graduation in 2019, Yang could have pursued postdoctoral opportunities at Stanford University or MIT and Apple tried to recruit him. Instead, he returned to China to focus on his startup.[3]

In 2020, Yang worked with Huawei on an early version of Huawei PanGu.[4]

In 2021, Yang led a team to work on the development of the Wu Dao LLM at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.[4]

Yang has said that ChatGPT's release led him to pursue the generative artificial intelligence trend.[1] He made a trip to the United States to learn more about ChatGPT one month after it was released.[4]

In March 2023, Yang co-founded Moonshot AI with Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, his Splay band-mates and classmates at Tsinghua. The company name comes from the album The Dark Side of the Moon and the company was launched on its 50th anniversary.[1][2][3]

In December 2024, the South China Morning Post was reported that five Recurrent AI investors, among them GSR Ventures, had taken their dispute with Yang over his departure from the company to arbitration in Hong Kong.[5] The Daily Telegraph reports that a settlement was reached through the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre.[6]

Moonshot AI may list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2026, where some estimates value it at potentially $30 billion, with Yang's shares worth several billion.[6][7]

See also

References

  1. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 "214亿！这位90后AI天才，太炸_腾讯新闻". news.qq.com (in Chinese (China)). 8 September 2025. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
  2. 1 2 3 4 5 "这个清华学霸，边玩摇滚边搞了一家180亿估值的AI公司". 于艾瑞. 22 February 2024.
  3. 1 2 3 4 5 Berman, Noah (28 September 2025). "Who Is Moonshot AI?". The Wire China. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
  4. 1 2 3 4 Jiang, Ben (7 August 2024). "Moonshot AI founder builds business in the mould of ByteDance, OpenAI". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
  5. ↑ Jiang, Ben (10 December 2024). "Moonshot AI founder's dispute with 5 investors up for arbitration in Hong Kong". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
  6. 1 2 vanLeeuwen, Hans (21 July 2026). "China's baby-faced billionaire sends global markets into panic". The Telegraph. London. Retrieved 22 July 2026.
  7. ↑ "Profil Yang Zhilin, Otak di Balik Kimi K3 Pengguncang AI | Vasiota Media" (in Indonesian). 28 July 2026. Retrieved 9 August 2026.
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