Liang Wenfeng has no life, Yang Zhiping has no way back

Original Author: Jialiu

In the week since Kimi K3 was released, the US tech community has been expressing collective regret, wondering why an outstanding young talent like Yang Zhilin didn't stay in America back then.

Kimi K3 surpasses all models in front-end capabilities

This topic garnered over five million views on X. David Sacks, the former White House AI lead under Trump and a close confidant, stated he has already switched from Claude to Kimi for handling a large volume of work, saying, "It's just much more fun because it gets straight to work instead of lecturing you." Meanwhile, veteran Silicon Valley venture capitalist Vinod Khosla blamed immigration policy, claiming the US is personally scaring away top talent.

The speculation grew. Yang Zhilin's doctoral advisor, Salakhutdinov, while publicly "showing off" his prized student on social media, also clarified why Yang didn't stay in the US: "If he didn't even have the courage to try starting a company, Yang Zhilin said he would regret it for the rest of his life."

On the other side of the ocean, another name from Guangdong, known widely in China's AI circles, is Liang Wenfeng.

Liang Wenfeng is seven years older than Yang Zhilin. Born in Wuchuan, Zhanjiang, he was a programmer who did quantitative trading for fifteen years. He rarely gives interviews, has no social media accounts, and colleagues describe his personality solely as "having no hobbies other than programming." After his DeepSeek R1 was released in January 2025, Nvidia's market cap evaporated nearly $600 billion in a single day, an event Silicon Valley called the Sputnik moment. While the world searched for him, he retreated to his hometown to play soccer for a few days.

Two men from Guangdong, one born in Wuchuan, the other in Shantou, separated by the Leizhou Peninsula. Their companies are on the same track, charting almost perfectly mirrored trajectories, yet every fork in the road stems from their fundamental personalities.

1. A Radio and a Band

Liang Wenfeng was born in 1985 in Mili Ling Village, Tanba Town, to parents who were primary school teachers. With few toys at home, his most important childhood possession was a Feiyue-brand radio, which he took apart and reassembled countless times.

This quiet child showed his uniqueness early on. His middle school homeroom teacher remembered he wasn't a bookworm, nor did he appear to work harder than others, but he had self-taught high school math by junior high and started flipping through university textbooks, "as if he didn't need much time to master every subject."

In the 2002 college entrance exam, he scored 806 points, the top scorer in Zhanjiang City. Photos of him receiving the award can still be found online: wearing a maroon short-sleeved shirt with a large red flower pinned to his chest and a stiff expression, clearly pushed onto the stage by a teacher. That autumn, he entered Zhejiang University's Electronic Information Engineering program. But in the following two decades, there were hardly any occasions worthy of another photograph.

Seven years later in Shantou, another Guangdong boy grew up. Yang Zhilin, born in 1992, ranked first in his class throughout his four years in Tsinghua's Computer Science department and published over twenty papers. While these achievements aren't the rarest at Tsinghua, what was unusual was that amidst these accomplishments, he formed a rock band named Splay, after a data structure, playing the drums himself.

He later explained, "At that time, I felt I had a lot to express, including the pressure from reality and the absurdity of the environment." They wrote a song about a daydream of getting rich overnight after a successful startup, "half out of empathy, half as a reminder to myself not to become too utilitarian."

Years later, this band would re-enter the story in an unexpected way: bandmate Zhou Xinyu became a co-founder of Moonshot AI.

And at the entrance of Moonshot AI's office sits a white Yamaha electric piano, on which rests Pink Floyd's 1973 album, "The Dark Side of the Moon." The company's name comes from this album.

The Dark Side of the Moon album

One took apart a radio where no one could see; the other played drums because he had something he *had* to express. Almost every choice made by these two in the following twenty years grew from these roots.

2. A Rented Room in Chengdu and the Hallways of CMU

After graduating from Zhejiang University, Liang Wenfeng didn't go to a big tech firm for a technical credential. He went to Chengdu, hid in a cheap rented room, and experimented with various algorithms, trying to equip traditional industries with AI, but all attempts failed. The founding teams of China's top quantitative funds mostly had experience at overseas hedge funds, but Liang Wenfeng figured it out on his own in that rented room.

In 2015, he founded High-Flyer with classmates from Zhejiang University. What followed was a series of moves that few understood at the time: spending nearly 200 million yuan in 2019 to build a proprietary cluster of 1,100 GPUs; adding another 1 billion yuan in 2021 to hoard about 10,000 A100 GPUs.

Quantitative trading doesn't require that many cards. Liang himself admitted, "For just trading, a few cards are enough." Someone who interacted with him early on recalled thinking he was just a poorly dressed tech geek burning money when he saw him hoarding cards to train models.

But he was doing the opposite of what everyone understood. He wasn't using AI to cut costs and improve efficiency in finance; he was using finance to fund AI research. Most Chinese AI companies follow the sequence of securing funding, finding a product, then generating cash flow. He completely reversed this order: build a cash flow machine first, then use it to buy the freedom to do research.

Yang Zhilin took a different path, one paved with both flowers and mines.

After Tsinghua, he went to CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) for his Ph.D., meanwhile conducting research at Google and Meta's AI labs. In 2017, he bet everything on language models, later calling it "the only important problem." During his Ph.D., he published two papers: one taught AI to remember longer contexts, and the other beat Google's own strongest model in 20 tests. Their combined citations approach 20,000.

Years later, Kimi became popular for its ability to handle long text inputs. Many thought it was a temporary differentiator found in 2023. In reality, it was the direction he identified during his Ph.D., merely transformed into a different form.

In 2016, while still a Ph.D. student, he co-founded Recurrent AI, focusing on sales call analysis, with Sequoia and GSR Ventures as shareholders. This venture gave him an early taste of the roughness of commercializing technology, but it also planted a mine under his feet, which would detonate eight years later.

After graduating with his Ph.D. in 2019, his advisor arranged a meeting with an Apple executive who reported directly to Tim Cook, asking if Yang wanted to join Apple, possibly even at Apple China. Yang declined the emails from Apple and offers from Silicon Valley, deciding to return to China.

At that time, Liang Wenfeng was hoarding GPUs in Hangzhou, and Yang Zhilin was waiting for the wind in Beijing. Neither knew of the other's existence, nor that these two names would come to represent today's Chinese AI landscape.

3. A One-Month Window and a Catfish

On November 30, 2022, ChatGPT launched, causing collective sleeplessness in Silicon Valley's tech community. Yang Zhilin recalled that many friends around him were anxious, experiencing FOMO, unable to sleep, and many turned to start their own companies.

"We started focusing on the first round of funding in February 2023. If we delayed until April, there would be basically no chance. But doing it in December 2022 or January 2023 wouldn't have worked either because of the pandemic; people hadn't reacted yet." Yang Zhilin seized that one-month window and didn't rest for a single day.

In March 2023, Moonshot AI was founded, with co-founders being Tsinghua alumni Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin. It reportedly raised $60 million in seed funding and gathered about 40 AI researchers in three months. Then came the steepest curve in Chinese large model financing history: Sequoia and ZhenFund entered, Alibaba led a $1 billion investment, followed by Tencent, Meituan, and Xiaohongshu, pushing the valuation to $3.3 billion. With its 200,000-character long-context capability, Kimi became the first large model product used frequently by many Chinese users.

During that period, Yang Zhilin lived in a dual state. Externally, he spoke the grandest narratives, estimating the probability of scaling law failing as close to zero, comparing starting a company to driving towards endless snow-capped mountains, and describing the first year as building a rocket prototype and getting a taste of the fuel formula. Internally, he had to oversee the most trivial algorithms: when computing power was tight, a machine might cost 260 one day, 340 the next, then drop back. Buy or rent? Which channel? Track daily, adjust daily. The certainty of a scientist and the shrewdness of a small business owner coexisted in this 31-year-old.

But everything given by capital came with a price tag. To sustain the growth curve, Kimi spent 220 million yuan on marketing in October 2024 and another 200 million in November, burning more in two months than the entire third quarter. The drummer who wrote a song mocking overnight wealth became the founder spending the most on user acquisition in the entire industry. It wasn't that he had changed; it was the $3.3 billion valuation making decisions for him.

Liang Wenfeng entered the scene in Hangzhou in a way that seemed almost deliberately contrarian.

In 2023, DeepSeek spun off from High-Flyer, refusing any external investment. The team had fewer than 140 people, almost no returnees from overseas, consisting mainly of fresh graduates from Chinese universities and young people a few years out of school. No KPIs, no hierarchy. If you had an idea, you could directly allocate computing resources and personnel.

A former employee told the Washington Post that Liang would delve into the details of training strategies, read papers and write code alongside researchers, "completely unlike a boss, more like a geek." He explained why he hired fresh graduates instead of poaching industry heavyweights: "Experienced people will tell you without thinking how it should be done, but inexperienced people will explore repeatedly."

In May 2024, DeepSeek-V2 slashed API prices to 1 yuan per million tokens. ByteDance, Alibaba, Baidu, and Tencent were forced to follow suit. The whole industry thought it was a long-planned business war. His response was: "We didn't intend to be a catfish; we just accidentally became one."

Pricing was set slightly above cost, ensuring "no subsidies and no exorbitant profits." Internet people talk about market share, entry points, and network effects in a price war; he talked about cost accounting. But it was precisely this emotionless price cut that was most deadly, dragging large model APIs from the narrative of high margins directly into the pricing logic of infrastructure.

At some point, the outside world began comparing the two completely different business models of Yang Zhilin and Liang Wenfeng.

4. Yang Zhilin in Suspension

The mine Yang Zhilin planted eight years ago detonated in November 2024.

Five old shareholders from his previous venture, Recurrent AI, initiated arbitration against him in Hong Kong, alleging he started fundraising for his new company before obtaining full shareholder waivers.

On December 5th, Zhu Xiaohu fired a broadside on WeChat Moments, targeting Zhang Yutong heavily: the former GSR Ventures partner received 9 million shares, representing 14% of Moonshot AI, for free initially, exceeding the 9.5% allocated to Recurrent AI as the "parent company." Zhu Xiaohu's proposed solution was almost humiliating: apologize, return the shares, or have the company cut ties with Zhang Yutong.

At 9:40 PM on December 6th, Yang Zhilin published a 1,300-word statement. He didn't cut ties; instead, he was definitive: Zhang Yutong is a co-founder, the shares are consideration for years of future work, and the procedures for leaving Recurrent AI had the signatures of every director. People close to the company conveyed the internal stance: She and Moonshot AI are already one entity, inseparable.

Zhu Xiaohu publicly stated he completely didn't understand. In a purely commercial framework, it's indeed inexplicable; cutting ties is the only rational option. But Yang Zhilin's decision-making framework includes other considerations. Salakhutdinov's later clarification provided a footnote: This is exactly the kind of person who "would regret not trying for the rest of [his] life." Once he decides on something, he doesn't look back, even if the cost is already on the table.

The real hammer fell over forty days later.

On January 20, 2025, R1 was released. Free, open-source, with reasoning capabilities rivaling OpenAI's o1. A team of just over a hundred in Hangzhou turned the global capital market upside down within a week. Researcher Matt Sheehan from Carnegie said something very interesting: "DeepSeek wasn't the company China pre-selected; even China was surprised by its explosive popularity."

Meanwhile, Liang Wenfeng was celebrating the New Year in his hometown of Wuchuan. On the afternoon of January 27th, he played a soccer game in the village with his middle school classmates. The village entrance was crowded with tourists checking in, while the man himself was on the field.

For Yang Zhilin, it was a double blow. The arbitration was unresolved, and R1 directly passed a death sentence on his strategy of the past year: users acquired through marketing were insignificant against a free and stronger competitor. Public opinion turned against him. One article was titled "Yang Zhilin: The Suspension of a Post-90s Idealist." Suspension means feet not touching the ground. He wrote songs worried about becoming utilitarian, and now the whole world said he was both utilitarian and a failure.

Moonshot AI at the beginning of 2025 had money in the bank but very little leverage.

5. A Comeback Against Gravity

The following year was crucial for Yang Zhilin.

Yang Zhilin essentially repudiated his entire past year. He stopped marketing spending, cut redundant businesses, narrowed focus to the base model, and shifted to open-source. In a conversation at Geek Park, he said the inertia of an organization is to want to do more and more things. "We have to fight this gravity."

Saying this was easy; doing it meant admitting the strategy was wrong, laying off people he hired, and bowing to the competitor that almost destroyed him. Most 33-year-old founders can't get past this hurdle. Yang Zhilin crossed it with unusual decisiveness. Perhaps because open-source and long-termism were always his factory settings; closed-source and user acquisition were just clothes capital dressed him in, which he has now shed.

In July 2025, the trillion-parameter K2 was open-sourced. In November, K2 Thinking surpassed GPT-5 on several of the hardest Agent benchmarks. Hugging Face co-founder Thomas Wolf asked on Twitter: Is this another DeepSeek moment?

In the early hours after the release, Yang Zhilin, along with Zhou Xinyu and Wu Yuxin, held an AMA on Reddit, answering 21 questions. They clarified the $4.6 million training cost wasn't an official figure, acknowledged they had fewer GPUs than US counterparts, "but squeezed every ounce of performance out of each card." When asked about OpenAI burning cash, Zhou Xinyu answered relaxedly: "We don't know either. Only Sam knows. We have our own pace."

Our own pace. Moonshot AI in 2024 couldn't utter these five words. Back then, its pace was the investors' pace, the pace of marketing ROI. It was Liang Wenfeng who gave these five words back to Yang Zhilin. R1 proved that open-source plus algorithmic efficiency works in China, effectively conducting a roadshow for Yang to his own board. The person nearly killed by DeepSeek ironically had to thank it for saving his life.

The market's reward was also direct. On the last day of 2025, Moonshot AI announced a $500 million Series C round, with Alibaba, Tencent, and Wang Huiwen all increasing their investments. The valuation reached $4.3 billion, and cash on hand exceeded 10 billion yuan. Within less than 20 days of K2.5's release, revenue surpassed the entire 2025 total. Monthly subscriptions from individual users surged over 80 times month-over-month