Chinese entrepreneur Yang Zhilin’s AI milestone triggers social media debate as to why he left the US and founded his startup in China.
After China’s Moonshot AI claimed that its Kimi K3 can rival OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI industry in the US has absolutely gone bonkers, lamenting that Moonshot AI’s Zhilin Yang studied in the US but then founded his company in China. Several prominent voices from the industry said it is America’s loss that America could not retain a top talent like Yang, while many complained that Yang might have found the immigration gridlock in the US difficult and decided to go home.Yang’s PhD supervisor at Carnegie Mellon University, Russ Salakhutdinov, broke his silence over the debate and said it was not true that Yang was not offered a job in the US. He clarified that Yang was determined to start his own company in China and there was no visa denial for such talent who completed his PhD in four years.There was no H-1B lottery or factors like that, Russ said. “Zhilin had many opportunities to stay in the U.S. if he wanted to. In fact, I was on an email thread with a senior Apple exec (Tim Cook’s reports) asking whether Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said that he wanted to go back to his homeland. The response was, well, we have an office in Beijing if he’d like to join there,” the professor said. “But Zhilin was quite determined to go back and build a startup. 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. I respect that, and he was right.””Many of my international PhD students do choose to stay in the U.S. Of course the U.S. immigration process can be quite intimidating and uncertain, even for superstar PhD graduates from places like CMU,” the professor said, explaining what happens to many PhD students, but did not happen to Yang.The debate on social media did not remain confined to just ranting, as former White House AI and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks commented that the US was “tying itself in knots” over AI and risking its competitive edge. Though he did not address the immigration issue, his critique was sharp against policy shackles.“Meanwhile America is tying itself in knots: politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve frontier models,” the venture capitalist wrote in a post on social platform X.“This is how you lose the AI race,” he continued. “The rest of the world won’t play by our rules if we bog ourselves down. Permissionless innovation is how America won the internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI — while addressing risks in a targeted way — or we’ll watch our lead evaporate.”
