Yang Zhilin
Yang Zhilin | |||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 杨植麟 | |||||||||||
| Born | 1992 (age 33–34) | ||||||||||
| Education | |||||||||||
| Known for | Co-founder of Moonshot AI Co-author of XLNet and Transformer-XL | ||||||||||
| Scientific career | |||||||||||
| Fields | Artificial intelligence | ||||||||||
| Thesis | Advances in Generative Feature Learning (2019) | ||||||||||
| Academic advisors |
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| Chinese name | |||||||||||
| Simplified Chinese | 杨植麟 | ||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 杨植麟 | ||||||||||
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Yang Zhilin (Chinese: 杨植麟; pinyin: Yáng Zhílín; born 1992) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman who is the co-founder of the artificial intelligence (AI) company, Moonshot AI. He also co-founded Recurrent AI.
Yang is also the co-author of the papers relating to XLNet and Transformer-XL.
Early life and education
Yang was born in 1992 in Shantou, Guangdong province. He once dreamt of becoming a rock star or a wandering poet. His favourite band is Pink Floyd and his favourite album is The Dark Side of the Moon.[1][2]
Yang attended Shantou Jinshan Middle School. Despite having no programming background, after one year of training he won first prize in National Olympiad in Informatics in Guangdong province which earned him admittance to Tsinghua University. However he still sat the Gaokao earning a score of 667 which was the highest score in the science section for Shantou and earned him admittance again.[1]
At Tsinghua, Yang originally majored in Thermal engineering. However, after reading a novel by Haruki Murakami, Yang decided to change his major to Computer science. His academic adviser was Jie Tang (co-founder of Z.ai). During his time at university, Yang formed a rock band called Splay (named after Splay tree) where he was drummer and songwriter.[2]
After graduating from Tsinghua in 2015, Yang moved to the United States to attend Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) to pursue his PhD. He studied under Ruslan Salakhutdinov (Apple director of AI research) and William Cohen (Google DeepMind principal scientist).[1][2][3]
During his PhD studies, Yang worked at Google Brain and Meta Platforms. He also co-authored papers on computer reasoning and pattern recognition with Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. His most notable papers authored are on XLNet and Transformer-XL.[1][3][4]
In 2019, Yang obtained his PhD from CMU after four years which was earlier than the standard six years.[1][3]
Career
In 2016 during his studies, Yang co-founded Recurrent AI, an AI company that focused on sales technology. It used the Transformer-XL algorithm to provide solutions.[2]
After graduation in 2019, it was said that Yang could have pursued postdoctoral opportunities at Stanford University or MIT and that Apple tried to recruit him. Instead Yang returned to China to focus on his startup company.[3]
In 2020. Yang worked with Huawei on an early version of Huawei PanGu.[4]
In 2021, Yang led a team to work on the development of the Wu Dao LLM at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence.[4]
In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT. Yang realised he didn't want to miss out on the Generative artificial intelligence trend.[1] The next month he made a trip to the United States to learn more about ChatGPT as we recruit staff.[4]
In March 2023, Yang co-founded Moonshot AI with some Tsinghua alumni who were his Splay band-mates. The name comes from the album The Dark Side of the Moon and the company was launch on its 50th anniversary.[1][2][3]
In December 2024, it was reported Yang was locked in a legal dispute with investors of Recurrent AI that included GSR Ventures over his departure from the company.[5]
See also
References
- ^ a b c d e f g "214亿！这位90后AI天才，太炸_腾讯新闻". news.qq.com (in Chinese (China)). 8 September 2025. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
- ^ a b c d e "这个清华学霸，边玩摇滚边搞了一家180亿估值的AI公司". 于艾瑞. 22 February 2024.
- ^ a b c d e Berman, Noah (28 September 2025). "Who Is Moonshot AI?". The Wire China. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
- ^ a b c d Jiang, Ben (7 August 2024). "Moonshot AI founder builds business in the mould of ByteDance, OpenAI". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 14 March 2026.
- ^ Jiang, Ben (10 December 2024). "Moonshot AI founder's dispute with 5 investors up for arbitration in Hong Kong". South China Morning Post. Retrieved 14 March 2026.