# Yang Zhilin Founder and CEO of [[Moonshot AI]], the Chinese frontier AI lab behind the [[Kimi]] assistant and the Kimi K2 open-weight model series ([[Kimi K2.6]], [[Kimi K2.5]]). Previously a research scientist at Meta AI and Google Brain, and a PhD at Carnegie Mellon University under [[Ruslan Salakhutdinov]] and [[William Cohen]]. Co-author of XLNet and Transformer-XL, both widely cited pre-Transformer-era NLP papers. Founded Moonshot in 2023 with a bet on long-context and long-horizon reasoning; the company has since evolved that thesis into agentic coding with the K2 line. One of the most visible figures of the "AI Tigers" cohort of Chinese frontier labs alongside [[Deepseek]], [[Zhipu AI (Z.ai)]], and [[Baichuan]]. ## Quotes <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/quote AND [[Yang Zhilin]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## Books <!-- QueryToSerialize: LIST FROM #type/book AND [[Yang Zhilin]] WHERE public_note = true SORT file.name ASC --> ## References - Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yang_Zhilin - Moonshot AI: https://www.kimi.com/ - Google Scholar: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=zhilin-yang ## Related - [[Moonshot AI]] - [[Kimi]] - [[Kimi K2.6]] - [[Kimi K2.5]]