Zhilin Yang is head of China-based start-up Moonshot AI, which on Friday launched its newest open-source AI model, Kimi K3, a powerful offering that could challenge the biggest US firms.
Moonshot AI cited various technology benchmark tests to claim that Kimi K3 is on a par with or more powerful than AI models from American companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic.
The company's 34-year-old founder attended Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where he completed his doctorate in only four years.
His computer science professor, Russ Salakhutdinov, congratulated his former student on X and said the latest Kimi model was a victory for the open-source AI community.
“It feels like just yesterday Zhilin was graduating from my lab at CMU,” Prof Salakhutdinov wrote.
“Not only did he complete his PhD in just four years, but he also made truly fundamental contributions to machine learning during his time at Carnegie Mellon University.”
According to Carnegie Mellon, Mr Yang earned his doctorate in 2019, specialising in language and information technology.
His personal website, which appears not to have been updated since 2022, says that he briefly worked at Meta and Alphabet-owned Google.
“I am working on a start-up,” he wrote on the site.
According to CNBC and Bloomberg, that start-up, Moonshot AI, officially emerged in 2023 and raised "$2 billion at a more than $20 billion valuation in May”.
The announcement that the US lead in AI has been challenged sent jitters through markets, with the tech-heavy Nasdaq down more than 1.4 per cent in early trading on Friday.
Nvidia shares also dropped, causing Apple to briefly surpass the chipmaker as the world's most valuable company.
Proponents say open-source models, where the code and technical specifications are freely available, democratise AI.
