‘A lot of confusion and misinformation’: Kimi K3 CEO’s PhD supervisor breaks silence on why Yang Zhilin didn’t stay in the US
After China’s Moonshot AI claimed that its Kimi K3 could rival OpenAI and Anthropic, the U.S. artificial intelligence industry went completely crazy, lamenting that Moonshot AI’s Yang Zhilin studied in the United States and then founded his own company in China. Many well-known figures in the industry said that the United States’ inability to retain top talents like Yang is a loss for the United States. Many people also complained that Yang may have decided to return to China because of the immigration impasse in the United States.Russ Salakhutdinov, Yang’s doctoral advisor at Carnegie Mellon University, broke his silence on the debate and said there was no truth to the news that Yang was not offered a job in the United States. He clarified that Yang was determined to start his own company in China and that a visa was not denied for such a talent who could complete his PhD in four years.Russ said there is no H-1B lottery or anything like that. “Zhilin has many opportunities to stay in the United States if he wants to. In fact, when I contacted a senior Apple executive (Tim Cook reports) via email, I asked whether Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said he wanted to return to his home country. The reply was that we have an office in Beijing if he wanted to join,” the professor said.“But Zhilin was determined to go back and start a startup. I remember him telling me that if he didn’t at least try to start his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respected that, and he was right.”“Many of my international PhD students do choose to stay in the United States. Of course, even for superstar PhD graduates from like Carnegie Mellon University, the immigration process to the United States can be quite daunting and uncertain,” the professor explains, explaining what happens to many PhD students but not in Yang’s case.The debate on social media was not limited to rants, with former White House artificial intelligence and cryptocurrency czar David Sacks commenting that the United States was “in trouble” on the issue of artificial intelligence and jeopardizing its competitive advantage. Although he did not address immigration, his criticism of policy constraints was trenchant.“Meanwhile, America is in trouble: Politicians and bureaucrats are banning new data centers, increasing state regulations, and pushing for new federal agencies to pre-approve cutting-edge models,” the venture capitalist wrote in a post on social platform X.“This is why you lose the AI race,” he continued. “If we get stuck, the rest of the world won’t play by our rules. The United States won the Internet through permissionless innovation and became the envy of the world in technology. We can do it again using artificial intelligence while addressing risks in a targeted manner, or we will watch our leadership evaporate.”
