The founder of China’s most popular AI startup du jour is having a hero moment.
Yang Zhilin, 34, founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, is going viral on Chinese social media platform Weibo. The executive’s Chinese fans have dubbed him a “millennial genius” after his new Kimi K3 model caused a stir in the global AI world.
The hashtag “Tsinghua University genius since the 1990s caused US stocks to crash” was the third most popular tag on Weibo’s tech hot searches as of 10 a.m. local time on Wednesday. In China, the term “post-90s” refers to people born between 1990 and 1999.
By the time Business Insider viewed the tag at 10 a.m. local time, it had been viewed 32 million times in 24 hours.
“We used to follow Silicon Valley’s AI, but now Tsinghua entrepreneurs from the 90s have announced cutting-edge open source models that directly shook Wall Street,” a Weibo user from Beijing posted under the tag on Tuesday.
A user in China’s eastern Zhejiang province called Yang an “excellent student of Tsinghua University” and said his “excellent technology has directly disrupted Silicon Valley’s AI monopoly.”
Tsinghua University is a leading public university in Beijing. In the 2026 QS World University Rankings for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, Tsinghua University was ranked among the top 10 universities in the world.
There is also a group of Weibo users who are fans of Yang’s youthful appearance and call him “baby-faced.”
Another Weibo user from Zhejiang province echoed China’s “flat-flat” movement, saying in a more nihilistic tone: “I am increasingly convinced that the future really belongs to these geniuses and has little to do with ordinary people like us.”
Yang’s Weibo buzz comes shortly after Moonshot AI announced its latest AI model, Kimi K3, on Friday, promising to match the capabilities of Anthropic and OpenAI models in coding, inference, and knowledge-based tasks. The company announced that it will release model weights on July 27th so developers can fine-tune and build on model weights.
Following the model’s release, major U.S. tech stocks such as Google and Nvidia continued to fall, reminiscent of the havoc caused by Chinese AI startup DeepSeek last year.
Moonshot AI said in a Sunday
Industry executives are taking note of Kimi K3’s capabilities. “This is the first time that an open model outperforms all proprietary models in this comprehensive web engineering benchmark,” Guillermo Rauch, CEO of cloud platform Vercel, said in a post on Friday X.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a Saturday