HONG KONG: In 2019, Moonshot AI’s founder Yang Zhilin completed his PhD at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in just four years - about two fewer than the standard. Apple wanted him. Google and Meta had already hosted him as an intern. Postdoctoral doors at Stanford and MIT stood open. He chose none of them. He returned to China.
His CMU supervisor, Russ Salakhutdinov, later recalled Yang’s reasoning: “If he didn’t at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life.”
That decision - which once seemed a contrarian bet - now looks like foresight. Beijing-based Moonshot last week
released Kimi K3, a large language model that has been ranked alongside flagship offerings from OpenAI and Anthropic. Elon Musk called it “impressive work”.
Silicon Valley awoke to a question: why did America let him go? But one narrative, that Yang was pushed out by US immigration policy, is incomplete. Salakhutdinov has stressed he had multiple pathways to stay. An Apple executive even offered Yang a role in Apple’s Beijing office, accommodating his desire to be home. Yet Yang chose to build his own AI company, giving it a name taken from his favourite Pink Floyd album Dark Side of the Moon....
China is no longer merely a net importer of US-trained talent; it has built its own pipeline. Stanford’s Hoover Institution tracked 356 researchers behind DeepSeek’s core models and found that 53.5 per cent had never studied or worked outside China. Among those with US experience, 70 per cent ultimately returned to China. CNA
The last card the American losers are throwing is to blame others of stealing their IP or products that they don't have. It is almost a daily occurrence to hear the American losers alleging China or Chinese companies stealing their things when there is nothing of value in America that the Chinese want. The American losers are so desperate that the next thing they will be screaming will be Chinese students stealing their knowledge and information taught in American universities. Soon the clowns in Washington will stop Chinese students from admission into American universities, to stop students from studying there.
China must produce more open source AI apps, priced them competitively to finish off all the overpriced blood sucking American AI. Let the Americans have all their AI to themselves while the world enjoy and benefit from cheap and good Chinese AI.
The American losers will be buried in their own lies and ignorance.