The founder of China's hottest AI startup du jour is having a main character moment.
Yang Zhilin, the 34-year-old founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, is going viral on the Chinese social media platform Weibo. Chinese fans of the executive are calling him a "millennial genius" after his new Kimi K3 model made waves in the global AI landscape.
The hashtag "Post-90s Tsinghua University genius crashed US stocks" was the third-most-popular tag in Weibo's tech hot searches as of 10 a.m. local time Wednesday. In China, the term "Post-90s" refers to people born between 1990 and 1999.
The tag had been viewed 32 million times in 24 hours when Business Insider viewed it at 10 a.m. local time.
"We once chased after Silicon Valley's AI, but now a post-90s Tsinghua entrepreneur has unveiled a cutting-edge open-source model, directly shaking Wall Street," a Weibo user from Beijing posted under the tag on Tuesday.
A user from China's eastern Zhejiang province called Yang a "top student from Tsinghua University," and said his "superior technology directly shook 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 ranked among the top 10 colleges globally.
There's also a group of Weibo users who are fans of Yang's youthful appearance, calling him "baby face."
Another Weibo user from Zhejiang struck a more nihilistic tone, echoing China's "lie flat" movement: "I'm increasingly convinced that the future truly belongs to these geniuses and has little to do with ordinary people like us."
Yang's Weibo virality comes shortly after Moonshot AI launched its latest AI model, Kimi K3, on Friday, promising to rival the capabilities of Anthropic and OpenAI models in coding, reasoning, and knowledge-based tasks. The company said it would release the model weight on July 27, allowing developers to fine-tune and build on top of it.
The model's release was followed by a sell-off of big US tech stocks like Google and Nvidia, reminiscent of the shake-up caused by China's DeepSeek AI startup last year.
Moonshot AI said in a Sunday X post that the model's launch drew so many new subscribers that it had to temporarily subscriptions to reduce the load on its limited compute resources.
Industry executives have taken note of the Kimi K3's capabilities. Cloud platform Vercel's CEO, Guillermo Rauch, said in a Friday X post, "This is the first time that an open model is ahead of all proprietary ones for this comprehensive web engineering benchmark."
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk said in a Saturday X post that Grok's coming model "might be able to exceed Kimi," thanks to its two-trillion-parameter training, to which Kimi responded on Weibo, "Welcome to the 2 Trillion+ Club."