China's internet is obsessed with Yang Zhilin, the "millennial genius" founder of Moonshot AI.
XU KANGPING / Feature China/Future Publishing via Getty Images
The founder of China's hottest AI startup du jour is having a main character moment.Yang Zhilin, the 34-year-old founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, is going viral on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Chinese fans of the executive are calling him a "millennial genius" after his new Kimi K3 model made waves in the global AI landscape.The hashtag "Post-90s Tsinghua University genius crashed US stocks" was the third-most-popular tag in Weibo's tech hot searches as of 10 a.m. local time Wednesday. In China, the term "Post-90s" refers to people born between 1990 and 1999.The tag had been viewed 32 million times in 24 hours when Business Insider viewed it at 10 a.m. local time."We once chased after Silicon Valley's AI, but now a post-90s Tsinghua entrepreneur has unveiled a cutting-edge open-source model, directly shaking Wall Street," a Weibo user from Beijing posted under the tag on Tuesday.A user from China's eastern Zhejiang province called Yang a "top student from Tsinghua University," and said his "superior technology directly shook Silicon Valley's AI monopoly."Tsinghua University is a leading public university in Beijing. In the 2026 QS World University Rankings for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua ranked among the top 10 colleges globally.
