Moonshot founder Yang Zhilin retains top research team amid AI talent war

China’s AI talent competition is brutal, and most founders lose their best people to bigger wallets. Yang Zhilin, the founder of Beijing-based Moonshot AI, appears to be winning that fight anyway. Moonshot AI has held together what observers describe as China’s strongest AI research team, a notable feat given that well-funded rivals are constantly circling with better offers. For a company that launched in March 2023 and employs around 80 people, the retention story alone is worth paying attention to. Who is Yang Zhilin, and why does it matter Yang Zhilin holds a PhD from Carnegie Mellon University and co-authored Transformer-XL and XLNet, two models that shaped how the industry thinks about language understanding. He co-founded Moonshot alongside Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, and the three have built the company on a focused bet: consumer-facing AI products, with the Kimi personal assistant as the flagship. The company raised $60 million shortly after its founding, a relatively lean war chest compared to the billions flowing into frontier AI labs in the US. Kimi K3 and the race for open-weight dominance The next concrete test of Moonshot’s research strength is the Kimi K3 model, expect...