PeopleofSuperintelligence

Lab leader

Yang Zhilin

Also known as 杨植麟

Yang Zhilin is an AI researcher and lab leader whose work helped language models carry context across long text. He studied at Tsinghua University and Carnegie Mellon, co-founded Recurrent AI, and worked with Google Brain and Meta AI. His research includes Transformer-XL, XLNet, GLM, and CodeGeeX; Moonshot AI's Kimi began as a long-context chatbot and grew into models for agentic coding and reasoning. As of October 2026, he is Moonshot AI's CEO, and TIME has named him to its TIME100 AI Innovators list.

Now at
Moonshot AI
Photo of Yang Zhilin

Timeline

  1. 2015

    A degree at Tsinghua

    He earns a bachelor's degree in computer science at Tsinghua University in 2015.

  2. 2015–2019

    A doctorate at Carnegie Mellon

    At Carnegie Mellon, he completes a PhD in Language and Information Technology in 2019.

  3. 2016

    A startup for sales teams

    He co-founds Recurrent AI, a startup that applies AI to sales conversations.

  4. 2019–2023

    Models with longer context

    He co-authors Transformer-XL, which uses segment-level recurrence to carry context across text, and XLNet, which combines autoregressive pretraining with Transformer-XL ideas. After his doctorate, he works with Google Brain and Meta, then returns to China for AI work on Huawei's PanGu and BAAI's Wu Dao. He also co-authors GLM, which uses autoregressive blank infilling, and CodeGeeX, a multilingual code-generation model.

  5. 2023

    Launching Moonshot and Kimi

    In 2023, he helps found Moonshot AI. Its Kimi Chat assistant launches as a 100B-plus-parameter chatbot with a long-context focus.

  6. 2025

    Opening Kimi to developers

    Kimi K2 and K2 Thinking give the open-source community agentic coding and reasoning capabilities.

  7. As of October 2026

    Named to TIME100 AI

    He is Moonshot AI's CEO, and the company has released Kimi K3. TIME named him to its 2026 TIME100 AI Innovators category.

Sources and credits

Photo: kimiyoung.github.io; Zhilin Yang; creator not stated. License: Not stated by source. Source: kimiyoung.github.io. Cropped to a square and resized. Ask us to remove or replace this photo.

  1. Zhilin Yang kimiyoung.github.io. Checked 14 October 2026.
  2. Yang Zhilin zgcforum.com.cn. Checked 14 October 2026.
  3. Zhilin Yang - Language Technologies Institute - School of Computer Science - Carnegie Mellon University lti.cs.cmu.edu. Checked 14 October 2026.
  4. Moonshot AI: $3 billion valuation overshadowed by legal dispute with 5 key investors · TechNode technode.com. Checked 14 October 2026.
  5. Who is Yang Zhilin? Meet Moonshot AI CEO and co-founder behind viral Kimi K3 model - India Today indiatoday.in. Checked 14 October 2026.
  6. [1901.02860] Transformer-XL: Attentive Language Models Beyond a Fixed-Length Context arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  7. [1906.08237] XLNet: Generalized Autoregressive Pretraining for Language Understanding arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  8. GLM: General Language Model Pretraining with Autoregressive Blank Infilling - ACL Anthology aclanthology.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  9. [2303.17568] CodeGeeX: A Pre-Trained Model for Code Generation with Multilingual Benchmarking on HumanEval-X arxiv.org. Checked 14 October 2026.
  10. "Different Organizations Allow Different Things to Emerge": Yang Zhilin's First In-Depth Interview | GeekPark about.geekpark.net. Checked 14 October 2026.
  11. TIME names 100 most influential people in AI for 2026 aa.com.tr. Checked 14 October 2026.