Foreigners are Up in Arms over Kimi K3, Questioning Why the U.S. Didn't Retain Yang Zhi Lin

According to Dongcha Beating monitoring, after the release of Kimi K3, foreign attention quickly shifted from the model to Yang Zhilin. The media began to review his background: he received his undergraduate education at Tsinghua University, obtained his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, worked at Google Brain and Meta, and finally returned to China to found Dark Side of the Moon. K3 approaches the forefront of the United States in programming and agent tasks, causing many to begin to ask, "Why didn't the United States retain him?"

One group attributes the responsibility to the U.S. immigration system. Vinod Khosla, founder of Khosla Ventures, stated that the United States is scaring away top global talent with its immigration policy. YC partner Ankit Gupta was more direct, saying that the United States not granting a green card directly to every AI Ph.D. is simply foolish.

However, Yang Zhilin's mentor, Russ Salakhutdinov, later clarified that this explanation does not apply to Yang Zhilin. At that time, he had many opportunities to stay in the United States, and even Apple executives had actively invited him to join. Yang Zhilin insisted on returning to China to start a business because he felt that if he didn't try it once, he would regret it for a lifetime.

On the other hand, some xenophobic accounts turned their criticism towards Russ and American universities. Some claimed that the American academic community "let down Americans," and even brought up his student's ethnicity as a point of contention. However, some scholars defended Russ, believing that he was only proud of his students' achievements and should not be subjected to nationalist attacks for this.

Subsequently, Carnegie Mellon University professor Jian Ma stated that while Yang Zhilin's success is indeed rare, there are many equally outstanding international students at American universities. The increasing uncertainty surrounding immigration and international exchanges will only make it harder for the United States to attract these talents.