Chinese entrepreneur Yang Qilin’s achievement in artificial intelligence has sparked debate on social media about why he left the United States and founded his startup in China.
After Chinese company Moonshot AI claimed that its Kimi K3 could compete with OpenAI and Anthropic, the US AI industry went absolutely crazy, 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 was America’s loss that America was unable to retain top talent like Yang, while many complained that Yang may have found it difficult to get through the US immigration route and decided to return to his homeland.Ross Salakhutdinov, Yang’s thesis supervisor at Carnegie Mellon University, broke his silence on the discussion and said it was not true that Yang had not been offered a job in the United States. He explained that Yang was determined to start his own company in China and there was no visa refusal for such talents who completed their doctorate in four years.There was no H-1B lottery or factors like that, Ross said. “Zhilin had many opportunities to stay in the US if he wanted to. In fact, I was in an email thread with a senior Apple executive (Tim Cook reports) asking if Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said he wanted to return to his home country. And the professor said, ‘Well, we have an office in Beijing if he wants to join there.’”
“But Zhilin was absolutely determined to come back and build 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 respect that, and he was right.”“Many international doctoral students choose to remain in the United States,” the professor said, explaining what happens to many doctoral students, but not to Yang. “Of course, the process of immigrating to the United States can be quite scary and uncertain, even for distinguished doctoral graduates from places like Carnegie Mellon.”The debate on social media did not remain limited to just shouting and clamor, as David Sachs, the former AI and cryptocurrency czar in the White House, commented that the United States was “tying itself in knots” regarding artificial intelligence and risking its competitive advantage. Although he did not address the immigration issue, his criticisms were sharp against policy restrictions.“Meanwhile, America complicates itself: politicians and bureaucrats are blocking new data centers, piling on state regulations, and pressuring new federal agencies to pre-approve border forms,” the venture capitalist wrote in a post on social media 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 get ourselves bogged down in a quagmire. Permissive 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 will watch our progress evaporate.”
