I think there's a lot of confusion and misinformation about Zhilin's visa, H1B lottery, immigration, and why he left the U.S. 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. But Zhilin was quite determined to go back and build a startup. I remember him telling me that if he didn't at least try starting his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respect that, and he was right. Many of my international PhD students do choose to stay in the U.S. Of course the U.S. immigration process can be quite intimidating and uncertain, even for superstar PhD graduates from places like CMU.

I’ve been asked several times whether Zhilin Yang, the founder of @Kimi_Moonshot was my PhD student. The answer is yes and he is absolutely brilliant. But I’ve been incredibly fortunate to work with so many outstanding PhD students over the years. So I thought I’d brag a little about them and their career paths (of course there are also many MSc and undergraduate students, sorry if I missed anyone): Founders / Founding Team Members Devendra Chaplot @dchaplot PhD, Founding Member Thinking Machines / Mistral Zhilin Yang PhD, Founder & CEO, Moonshot AI Jimmy Ba @jimmybajimmyba MSc/PhD, Co-founder xAI Hubert Tsai PhD, Co-founder Spuree, Apple Nitish Srivastava @nitishsr PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines; Co-founder Vayu Robotics Charlie Tang PhD, Co-founder Perceptual Machines, DE Shaw. Professors Paul Liang @pliang279 PhD, MIT Ben Eysenbach @ben_eysenbach PhD, Princeton University Ruosong Wang @RuosongW PhD, Peking University Bhuwan Dhingra @bhuwandhingra PhD, Duke University Roger Grosse @RogerGrosse Postdoc, University of Toronto Alexander Schwing Postdoc, UIUC Research Scientists Shuyan Zhou @shuyanzh36, Postdoc, Meta Superintelligence Lab Tiffany Min @SoYeonTiffMin PhD, Microsoft AI Murtaza Dalal @mihdalal PhD, Tesla AI Minji Yoon @MinjiYoon90 , PhD, Microsoft AI Shrimai Prabhumoye PhD, NVIDIA AI, Mistral Haitian Sun @sun_haitian PhD, Google DeepMind Emilio Parisotto PhD, Google DeepMind Lisa Lee PhD @rl_agent, Google DeepMind Manzil Zaheer @ManzilZaheer PhD, Google DeepMind Jamie Kiros PhD, Google Brain, OpenAI Yuri Burda PhD, OpenAI, Anthropic Cody Severinski PhD, Amazon

Congratulations to Zhilin Yang, founder and CEO of @Kimi_Moonshot, on the latest Kimi release. What a huge win for the open-source community! It feels like just yesterday Zhilin was graduating from my lab at CMU, jointly co-advised with William Cohen. Not only did he complete his Ph.D. in just four years, but he also made truly fundamental contributions to ML during his time at CMU. What a spectacular career! Congrats again Zhilin, and thank you and the entire Kimi team for everything you're doing for the open-source community.