After China's Moonshot AI claimed that its Kimi K3 can rival OpenAI and Anthropic, the AI industry in the US has absolutely gone bonkers, 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 is America's loss that America could not retain a top talent like Yang, while many complained that Yang might have found the immigration gridlock in the US difficult and decided to go home.
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Yang's PhD supervisor at Carnegie Mellon University, Russ Salakhutdinov, broke his silence over the debate and said it was not true that Yang was not offered a job in the US. He clarified that Yang was determined to start his own company in China and there was no visa denial for such talent who completed his PhD in four years.
There was no H-1B lottery or factors like that, Russ said. "Zhilin had many opportunities to stay in the U.S. if he wanted to. In fact, I was on an email thread with a senior Apple exec (Tim Cook's reports) asking whether Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said that he wanted to go back to his homeland. The response was, well, we have an office in Beijing if he'd like to join there," the professor said.
