Reactions from ranked influencers
2 posts
The Moonshot founders are in a rock band and love Pink Floyd "Yang Zhilin, Moonshot AI’s founder and chief executive, is no stranger to the computer science elite. He earned a bachelors from Tsinghua University in 2015 before moving to the U.S. for a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University. He later worked at Google and Meta, and coauthored papers on computer reasoning and pattern recognition with Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio, a professor at the University of Montreal, and Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Meta." "Yang founded Moonshot AI in Beijing in 2023, alongside fellow Tsinghua alumni Zhang Yutao, Zhou Xinyu — with whom he played in a rock band called Splay — and Wu Yuxin. All four men are still at the firm, whose Chinese name translates to Dark Side of the Moon, a reference to a 1970s album by British rockers Pink Floyd. Its meeting rooms are named after bands like the Rolling Stones and Led Zeppelin; one is called Splay."
Seeing the success of the American-educated founder of Kimi/Moonshot is another big whiff for America. We should do EVERYTHING we can to retain the world’s best talent. Immigration is the USA’s superpower. https://twitter.com/firstadopter/status/1287041905428180999
Chinese students are often down-to-earth do-ers, a critical characteristic in LLM era. Yuxin Wu was my intern back in 2015 and I spent an hour debating with my former manager on the roof of Facebook building, arguing that he should be hired. I won the debate by staking my reputation on it. Fortunately I was right. It used to be the case that the business model is fixed and business workflow clearly decouples into vision + execution. Professional CEO/VP/Director focus on presenting the long-term vision, and junior people sit in the war room to do the grudging work to push the numbers up, and no one knows their names. Things have changed substantially. The business pattern now depends on the technical strength of the models, which cannot be measured by a pre-defined set of benchmark numbers. Too many ways and too much incentive towards reward hacking, if sitting in a big hierarchy. Technical-first now becomes critical. Sit down and get things to work. Get hands dirty, check the data and code, fast feedback loop, step out of the echo chamber, tear the pretty story apart and rewrite, ready to say "I am wrong". Let experiments tell the issues and be humble in front of AI. That's why down-to-earth doers shine now. This applies to everyone including co-founders. Anything else follows.
Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, has four core founders. Their backgrounds are unusually strong: - Founder and CEO Yang Zhilin studied computer science at Tsinghua before earning his PhD from Carnegie Mellon. He was the first author of Transformer-XL and XLNet, and previously worked at FAIR and Google Brain. - Co-founder and CTO Zhang Yutao earned his PhD in computer science from Tsinghua. His earlier work covered knowledge graphs and AMiner, and he previously co-founded Recurrent AI with Yang. - Co-founder Wu Yuxin studied at Tsinghua and CMU before joining FAIR. He worked with Kaiming He on Group Normalization and also created Detectron2. - Co-founder Zhou Xinyu studied computer science at Tsinghua and later joined Megvii, where he worked on turning research algorithms into production systems and co-authored ShuffleNet. They all share one root: Tsinghua University. Tsinghua is widely regarded as one of China’s top universities. In the latest U.S. News Best Global Universities ranking, it reached No. 6 worldwide. Its influence on China’s AI industry extends well beyond Moonshot. http://Z.ai, the company behind the GLM models, also grew out of Tsinghua. Its co-founder and chief scientist, Tang Jie, was once Yang Zhilin’s teacher. There is also a more personal connection. Yang and Zhou formed a rock band together at Tsinghua. Moonshot AI’s Chinese name, 月之暗面, comes from Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon, one of Yang’s favorites. Kimi may look like a young AI company. Behind it is a much older network of classmates, teachers, research labs, and friendships.