It is normal for someone to take six years to complete a doctorate at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). A young man named Yang Zhilin got it in four, and immediately what had to happen happened: the big technology companies raffled him off. They wanted to sign him to Apple, Google or Meta, and both MIT and Stanford opened their doors to him. He could have stayed in the US and probably become a billionaire, but no.
He returned to China, founded Moonshot AI, created the Kimi family of AI models and became one of the great new AI gurus of the Asian giant. His story is a good example of a big problem they are having in the US.
A genius in the making. Yang graduated from the prestigious Chinese university of Tsinghua, and during his years at CMU he ended up collaborating on another of the “iconic papers” that were the seed of ChatGPT, the so-called “Transformer-XL“. That was a turning point in his career, because after that job he considered what he wanted to do with his life.
Start up yes, but not in the US. His supervisor at CMU, Russ Salakhutdinov, I remembered in the Financial Times what he discussed with Yang, who made it clear to him that “if he didn’t at least try to create his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life.” The curious thing is that he did not do it in the US, where he would surely have obtained plenty of financing and economic support, but rather he went to China, where he founded Moonshot AI. There he created the mentioned models of AI, of which the latest version, Kimi K3, has turned the market upside down: an open model that competes with the best of Anthropic and OpenAI and that has made Yang a current protagonist in the sector.
Working for others, what’s up?. There is a narrative in Silicon Valley that talks about how immigration regulation in the US is designed to get young talents to join large companies, and not so much to found their own startups. That was much more complicated, so the Chinese talents who had just trained in the US realized that they had a better option: return to their country of origin and create their startups there.
Source: Hoover Institution.
Chinese talent returns to China. A study by the Hoover Institution at Stanford analyzed the profile of the 356 researchers who worked on DeepSeek and revealed something surprising: 53.5% never studied or worked outside of China. Of those who did have an experience of this type and had studied or worked in the US, 70% ended up returning to their country. The Asian giant is no longer an exporter of brainiacs: it now has a self-sufficient quarry that boosts the country’s AI industry.
Less money, better execution. The difference between the US and China is not only financial, but operational. A Chinese entrepreneur in the sector explained in that FT report that although setting up his startup in the US would guarantee a valuation up to 10 times higher, in China he is much more likely to launch real solutions and production in less than five years. It doesn’t matter the sanctions, the risk of censorship or a much more conservative investment market: the density of engineers and the familiarity of the environment compensate.
Source: Stanford University.
The US does not make it easy. The phenomenon of the “return home” of Chinese engineers not only affects recent graduates, but also veteran professionals who were already installed in the country’s academic and engineering system. a survey conducted by Stanford University in 2024 among 1,304 scientists of Chinese origin who lived and worked in the United States revealed curious data. 73% did not feel safe working as a researcher in the country, and 65% pointed directly to a fear of harassment and racist violence. Political uncertainty and institutional distrust have only accelerated the exits.
Silicon Valley has a problem. The trajectory of Moonshot AI, which in just three years and with a team of 300 people has launched a fantastic model, shows that there is life beyond Silicon Valley. With Chinese talent returning en masse to China, the question is whether the US Government will modify its requirements and proposals for obtaining a visa. If they don’t, the “brain drain” can be absolute.
Image | Tommao Wang
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