Moonshot AI Founder Yang Zhilin Goes Viral With 32 Million Weibo Views as Kimi K3 Rattles US Tech
Updated
Updated · Business Insider · Jul 22
Moonshot AI Founder Yang Zhilin Goes Viral With 32 Million Weibo Views as Kimi K3 Rattles US Tech
3 articles · Updated · Business Insider · Jul 22
Summary
32 million views in 24 hours pushed a Weibo hashtag about 34-year-old Moonshot AI founder Yang Zhilin into China’s top tech trends after the Kimi K3 launch.
Kimi K3, unveiled Friday, was pitched as an open-source model that can rival Anthropic and OpenAI in coding, reasoning and knowledge tasks, with model weights due July 27.
US tech stocks including Google and Nvidia sold off after the release, echoing the market disruption triggered by China’s DeepSeek last year.
Subscriber demand surged so quickly that Moonshot temporarily paused new sign-ups, while Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch praised Kimi’s benchmark lead and Elon Musk said Grok’s next model might surpass it.