Yang Zhilin, who completed a PhD in computer science at Carnegie Mellon University, declined a senior Apple offer that would have reported into Tim Cook’s leadership circle, according to his former adviser Ruslan Salakhutdinov, because he believed he would regret not building his own company. Three years later, at age 32, he became one of China’s youngest AI founders and established Moonshot AI in 2023 after returning to China, convinced the country’s research talent, government backing, and venture capital ecosystem supported ambitious AI startups. The company, which rapidly secured hundreds of millions of dollars in funding, released the Kimi K3 model, which within two days of release saw demand overwhelm servers, forcing a pause on new subscriptions. K3 approaches the performance of frontier systems like GPT 5.6 Sol and Claude Fable 5 on major benchmarks and is free, openly released for developers to download, modify, and self-host, a combination neither OpenAI nor Anthropic offers. US officials, including the White House’s science and technology policy director, and Anthropic’s policy leadership have accused Moonshot of distilling its model.