Yang Zhilin

Yang Zhilin (; born 1992) is a Chinese entrepreneur and businessman who is the co-founder of the AI company Moonshot AI. He also co-founded Recurrent AI.

Yang is also the co-author of the papers relating to XLNet and Transformer-XL.

Early life and education Yang was born in 1992 in Shantou, Guangdong province. He once dreamt of becoming a rock star or a wandering poet. His favourite band is Pink Floyd and his favourite album is The Dark Side of the Moon.

Yang attended Shantou Jinshan Middle School. Despite having no programming background, after one year of training he won first prize in National Olympiad in Informatics in Guangdong province which earned him admission to Tsinghua University. He then took Tsinghua University's independent entrance examination and was admitted again. He nevertheless took the Gaokao, earning a 667 — the top score in Science in Shantau — which served as a third admission ticket to Tsinghua.

During his PhD studies, Yang worked at Google Brain and Meta Platforms. He also co-authored papers on computer reasoning and pattern recognition with Turing Award winners Yoshua Bengio and Yann LeCun. His most notable papers authored are on XLNet and Transformer-XL. In 2019, after four years, Yang obtained his PhD from CMU. The Daily Telegraph reports that a settlement was reached through the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre.

Moonshot AI may list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in 2026, where some estimates value it at potentially $30 billion, with Yang's shares worth several billion.