Yang Zhilin, the rock enthusiast dreaming of AI’s other side

There are books that can change a person’s life. And the course of a country. If China eventually overtakes the United States in the race for artificial intelligence dominance, it may owe part of the credit to Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami. One of his characters drew Yang Zhilin into the world of computer science, and today he leads Moonshot AI, the latest company pushing China closer to surpassing the United States, all to the soundtrack of Pink Floyd’s The Dark Side of the Moon.

Moonshot revved its engines and Silicon Valley felt the shake. Its latest AI model, Kimi K3, entered the global stage with performance comparable to the most powerful systems from OpenAI and Anthropic, but at a lower cost. Unlike its U.S. rivals, it is also an open-weight system, the largest of its kind to date, allowing users to download, modify and build upon it free of charge. “It’s a pretty good model,” says Greg Brockman, president of OpenAI. “There’s no question about it.” Houston, we have a problem.

As expected, the shockwave reached Wall Street, and the PHLX Semiconductor Index slipped into bear-market territory. Once again, a Chinese model was challenging U.S. technological supremacy despite efforts to slow its advance. If life gives you lemons, make lemonade. If the United States restricts exports of its most advanced semiconductors, invest in your domestic industry and improve algorithmic efficiency so systems can operate with fewer resources. Just a few months ago, Anthropic chief executive Dario Amodei estimated that Chinese models lagged Claude by between six and 12 months. He may have to revise those calculations.

Behind all the excitement is a 34-year-old who still looks like a teenager. His story is not that of a child prodigy moulded by a fiercely competitive education system and demanding parents, but of a bright young man given enough freedom to develop his independence and dream of becoming either a rock star or a wandering poet. “I made almost every important decision in my life myself,” he said in a 2020 interview with the Chinese outlet Sohu.

Winning regional computer science olympiads in high school opened the doors of Tsinghua University in Beijing, the alma mater of Chinese President Xi Jinping. He excelled not only in the university’s own admissions process but also in China’s notoriously demanding gaokao national entrance examination. He initially studied thermal engineering but changed course after reading a Murakami novel two years later. He cannot recall the story itself, only a gifted programmer among its characters and the desire it sparked to bring technology to life and change the world.

“Everything that happened afterwards convinced me that transferring to the Computer Science Department was the most important and correct decision I’ve ever made,” he later said.

There was room for more than code in his university years. Yang’s passion for rock music led him to form a band with two friends. He played drums, wrote songs and named the group Splay, after the self-adjusting data structure used in computer science. Music became a way to express both the pressures they faced and the absurdity they perceived in the world around them.

A doctorate in the United States

After graduating in 2015, Yang moved to the United States to pursue a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh under two leading figures in artificial intelligence: Ruslan Salakhutdinov, then at Apple, and William W. Cohen, who later became associated with Google.

“He is absolutely brilliant,” Salakhutdinov wrote of his former student on X.

Yang completed his doctorate in just four years, authored influential research in machine learning and spent time as a research intern at both Google and Meta.

He could easily have remained in the epicentre of global innovation. Opportunities were plentiful. But Yang wanted to return to China and build something of his own.

“I remember him telling me that if he didn’t at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life,” his mentor later recalled. “I respect that, and he was right.”

The launch of ChatGPT in 2022 triggered a mixture of frustration and excitement. Frustration because he had not been involved in such a transformative breakthrough; excitement because of the possibilities it revealed.

Later that year, he travelled to the United States to explore the landscape. One evening, after running the numbers, he convinced himself he could raise $100 million to launch his venture.

In March 2023, he founded the company. Its Chinese name is the title of Pink Floyd’s celebrated song The Dark Side of the Moon, and he ultimately raised nearly $300 million, largely from Chinese investors. According to Bloomberg, the most recent funding round valued the company at more than $31 billion. Backed by technology giants such as Alibaba and Tencent, Moonshot hopes to capitalize on the momentum generated by its latest model and is reportedly preparing for a public listing with ambitions of reaching a $50 billion valuation.

Yang has a mission: to set foot on the dark side of the moon. For him, the central question is not which AI product will dominate the market next year, but how artificial intelligence will reshape the world two decades from now.

“When artificial general intelligence is achieved, or even a superior form of intelligence, everything that exists today will be rewritten,” he told Tencent News in 2024.

He has not abandoned the development of applications and services, but believes that artificial general intelligence, a universal agent capable of performing virtually any task, is the only goal that will matter over the next decade. He views the technology with optimism and sees it as a force capable of carrying humanity into its next stage of development.

During his university years, Yang wrote a song about daydreaming of launching a successful start-up and becoming rich overnight. The song served as a reminder not to become someone driven solely by material ambition.

Technology races are unpredictable, and Yang may never achieve his moon landing.

“I accept the possibility of failure. It’s not that important,” he told Tencent. “This has already completely changed my life, and I’m very grateful.”

Sometimes, to keep your head in the moonlight, it helps to keep your feet firmly on the ground.

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