Carnegie Mellon PhD Builds Open AI Leader In China After US Funding Pushback
Reactions from ranked influencers
3 posts
The Kimi AI Model And What If This Carnegie Mellon, PhD student was incentivized to open source AI in the US? The answer is Kimi would have been an open source US model. Yang Zhilin Moonshot’s founder and maker of the Kimi series turned his deep research expertise into one of the world’s most capable open AI systems. After earning his PhD at Carnegie Mellon under leading researchers and interning at Google Brain and Meta, he returned to China and co-founded Moonshot AI in March 2023 with Tsinghua classmates Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. Why? The US VC world and tax structure did not favor Zhilin’s proposal to open source the AI models as a strategy. So he left. He named the company after his favorite Pink Floyd album, reflecting his ambitious vision for scalable. Yang assembled a core technical team of inventors behind breakthroughs like Transformer-XL and RoPE. Together they focused on turning massive compute into efficient intelligence through innovative architectures. The journey began with the Kimi chatbot in October 2023, rapidly scaling context from 200,000 to millions of characters. This evolved into the Kimi series: K1.5 matched top reasoning models, K2 introduced a 1-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts design trained on 15.5 trillion tokens and released openly, and K2 Thinking added advanced agentic capabilities. Kimi K3 represents the pinnacle, this 2.8-trillion-parameter model uses a sparse MoE architecture with 896 experts (only 16 active per token), new Kimi Delta Attention and attention residuals for efficiency, and a 1-million-token context window. It delivers frontier performance in long-horizon coding, reasoning, and multimodal tasks at competitive cost, with weights set for open release. Yang’s approach emphasizes openness, efficiency, and continuous self-improvement — enabling solo developers and teams to achieve what once required massive resources. By sharing technical insights in public talks, he has accelerated global progress toward more accessible, powerful AI. Imagine if we held open source higher than the fear theater games of Anthropic? We are chasing out some of the best minds. This is how you lose…
The Kimi model could have been a massive US open source project. The founder had a vision of the future that we did not welcome, so he want back home. The wrong folks are advising the wrong folks on grandpa’s way to monetize AI.
The Kimi AI Model And What If This Carnegie Mellon, PhD student was incentivized to open source AI in the US? The answer is Kimi would have been an open source US model. Yang Zhilin Moonshot’s founder and maker of the Kimi series turned his deep research expertise into one of the world’s most capable open AI systems. After earning his PhD at Carnegie Mellon under leading researchers and interning at Google Brain and Meta, he returned to China and co-founded Moonshot AI in March 2023 with Tsinghua classmates Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. Why? The US VC world and tax structure did not favor Zhilin’s proposal to open source the AI models as a strategy. So he left. He named the company after his favorite Pink Floyd album, reflecting his ambitious vision for scalable. Yang assembled a core technical team of inventors behind breakthroughs like Transformer-XL and RoPE. Together they focused on turning massive compute into efficient intelligence through innovative architectures. The journey began with the Kimi chatbot in October 2023, rapidly scaling context from 200,000 to millions of characters. This evolved into the Kimi series: K1.5 matched top reasoning models, K2 introduced a 1-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts design trained on 15.5 trillion tokens and released openly, and K2 Thinking added advanced agentic capabilities. Kimi K3 represents the pinnacle, this 2.8-trillion-parameter model uses a sparse MoE architecture with 896 experts (only 16 active per token), new Kimi Delta Attention and attention residuals for efficiency, and a 1-million-token context window. It delivers frontier performance in long-horizon coding, reasoning, and multimodal tasks at competitive cost, with weights set for open release. Yang’s approach emphasizes openness, efficiency, and continuous self-improvement — enabling solo developers and teams to achieve what once required massive resources. By sharing technical insights in public talks, he has accelerated global progress toward more accessible, powerful AI. Imagine if we held open source higher than the fear theater games of Anthropic? We are chasing out some of the best minds. This is how you lose…
The Kimi AI Model And What If This Carnegie Mellon, PhD student was incentivized to open source AI in the US? The answer is Kimi would have been an open source US model. Yang Zhilin Moonshot’s founder and maker of the Kimi series turned his deep research expertise into one of the world’s most capable open AI systems. After earning his PhD at Carnegie Mellon under leading researchers and interning at Google Brain and Meta, he returned to China and co-founded Moonshot AI in March 2023 with Tsinghua classmates Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. Why? The US VC world and tax structure did not favor Zhilin’s proposal to open source the AI models as a strategy. So he left. He named the company after his favorite Pink Floyd album, reflecting his ambitious vision for scalable. Yang assembled a core technical team of inventors behind breakthroughs like Transformer-XL and RoPE. Together they focused on turning massive compute into efficient intelligence through innovative architectures. The journey began with the Kimi chatbot in October 2023, rapidly scaling context from 200,000 to millions of characters. This evolved into the Kimi series: K1.5 matched top reasoning models, K2 introduced a 1-trillion-parameter Mixture-of-Experts design trained on 15.5 trillion tokens and released openly, and K2 Thinking added advanced agentic capabilities. Kimi K3 represents the pinnacle, this 2.8-trillion-parameter model uses a sparse MoE architecture with 896 experts (only 16 active per token), new Kimi Delta Attention and attention residuals for efficiency, and a 1-million-token context window. It delivers frontier performance in long-horizon coding, reasoning, and multimodal tasks at competitive cost, with weights set for open release. Yang’s approach emphasizes openness, efficiency, and continuous self-improvement — enabling solo developers and teams to achieve what once required massive resources. By sharing technical insights in public talks, he has accelerated global progress toward more accessible, powerful AI. Imagine if we held open source higher than the fear theater games of Anthropic? We are chasing out some of the best minds. This is how you lose…