China's AI 'big four': The 30- and 40-something founders shaking up Silicon Valley

Following DeepSeek, Chinese startup Moonshot AI's new AI model Kimi K3 has sent shockwaves through Wall Street and Silicon Valley — and the spotlight is now on the "big four" founders leading China's large language model industry.

Hong Kong newspaper Sing Tao Daily on Thursday (local time) profiled the four founders: Liang Wenfeng, 41, of DeepSeek; Yang Zhilin, 34, of Moonshot AI; Tang Jie, 49, of Zhipu; and Yan Junjie, 37, of MiniMax. The paper described all four — who are in their 30s and 40s — as academic prodigies who, despite pursuing different technical and business strategies, have each made their mark on the global AI market.

The youngest of the four, Yang Zhilin, leads Moonshot AI, which recently released Kimi K3 — one of the world's largest open-weight AI models, with 2.8 trillion parameters. Yang topped the science division of the college entrance exam in Shantou, Guangdong Province, before graduating from Tsinghua University's computer science department and going on to earn a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University.

He had already made a name for himself in the US AI industry — reportedly coveted by Apple — but in 2023 he chose to return to China rather than settle in the United States, and went on to found his company.

Moonshot AI is valued at around $31.5 billion, with Yang estimated to hold a 51.83 percent stake, putting his personal net worth at approximately $16.3 billion.

DeepSeek's Liang Wenfeng, unlike Yang, is a homegrown Chinese talent with no overseas study experience — yet the two share a defining trait: both are researchers first and entrepreneurs second.

Liang topped the college entrance exam in Wuchuan, Zhanjiang, Guangdong Province, before enrolling at Zhejiang University, where he studied electronic information. During his master's program he applied AI techniques to quantitative investing, and in 2015 he founded a quantitative hedge fund before eventually launching DeepSeek.

DeepSeek upended the AI landscape last January when it released an open-source AI model that delivered high performance at low cost — rattling an industry that had been seen as the exclusive domain of capital-rich American tech giants.

In its first funding round last month, DeepSeek was valued at between 350 billion and 400 billion yuan ($59 billion) and is estimated to have raised around 51 billion yuan in the process.

Liang is believed to hold voting rights approaching 100 percent and an 84.29 percent equity stake. Bloomberg puts his personal net worth at 256.7 billion yuan, ranking him among the world's 60 wealthiest individuals.

Tang Jie, a Tsinghua University professor, is the co-founder and chief scientist of AI company Zhipu, where he leads technology development.

After earning a doctorate in computer science and technology from Tsinghua in 2006, Tang turned down lucrative offers from multiple companies to remain on the faculty, and founded Zhipu in 2019.

In a recent internal email, Tang declared that "the great wave has already arrived" and said Zhipu would focus over the next two years on building artificial general intelligence infrastructure, forgoing short-term applications and monetization.

Zhipu recently completed construction of a massive data center built entirely with Chinese-made semiconductors and has begun partial operations.

Bloomberg reported Monday, citing sources, that Zhipu had completed and partially activated a 1 GW data center designed to support development of its advanced LLM GLM series.

Zhipu, already listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, had a market capitalization of approximately 489.8 billion yuan based on Friday's closing price.

MiniMax founder Yan Junjie enrolled in the mathematics department at Southeast University in 2006 and later pursued master's and doctoral degrees at the Institute of Automation under the Chinese Academy of Sciences. He also worked as a postdoctoral researcher in computer science at Tsinghua University.

MiniMax, which listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange in January, has a market capitalization of around 67 billion yuan. Yan's roughly 21.6 percent stake is valued at approximately 14.4 billion yuan.

In a recent internal email, Yan announced he would forgo any salary from the company until MiniMax achieves its AGI goals.