There is one founder making waves in the AI industry who is not an American tech billionaire like Elon Musk, Sam Altman or Dario Amodei. Yang Zhilin is the 34-year-old researcher and entrepreneur behind Chinese company Moonshot AI and its new open-weight Kimi K3 AI model, which caught the attention of Silicon Valley this week.
Chinese company Moonshot AI this week launched a new version of its Kimi model, generating another wave of discourse about China and open source AI. Moonshot said that although the Kimi K3 “still lags behind the most powerful proprietary models, the Claude Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol,” the new open source model “demonstrated frontier-level