March 25, 2026 – According to recent reports, Yang Zhilin, the founder of Moonshot AI, has stated that significant transformations are on the horizon for AI research and development (R&D) from this year through the next several years. He emphasized that an increasing number of research tasks will be primarily driven by AI itself.
In this new paradigm, each researcher will be provided with a substantial amount of AI Tokens. These tokens are designed to assist in generating new tasks, creating novel environments, defining appropriate reward functions, and even aiding in the exploration of innovative neural network architectures.
Yang believes that this shift will lead to an acceleration in the overall pace of AI R&D. He expressed his ambition to collaborate closely with the open-source community to drive the advancement of intelligent technologies and build a more robust ecosystem.
Yang Zhilin is a classic example of a Tsinghua-educated entrepreneur. He completed his undergraduate studies at Tsinghua University and later pursued a doctoral degree at Carnegie Mellon University, where he focused on large-scale model research at Google Brain. In April 2023, he established Moonshot AI at No. 27 Zhichun Road, Haidian District, Beijing.
Remarkably, Moonshot AI has achieved unicorn status with a valuation exceeding $10 billion in just over two years since its inception, surpassing the growth trajectories of even tech giants like Pinduoduo and ByteDance.
