The AI talent asymmetry is an own-goal — Yang Zhilin was trained in the US, built Kimi in China
Moonshot's founder Yang Zhilin (杨植麟) — first author of Transformer-XL and XLNet — did his PhD at Carnegie Mellon (2019) and returned to China, where he built a ~$20B frontier lab (correcting the episode's 'Yang Xilin' and its garbled chronology). MacroPolo's tracker is the settling primary on the asymmetry: no clean '70% non-citizen' figure exists; verified are that ~42% of top-tier researchers work outside their home country and ~75% of US-based top-tier talent is of American or Chinese origin. Green-card-stapling is the low-friction retention lever.
Why it matters (spine — geo). The geopolitics of compute. Frame high-skill immigration as measurable AI-competitiveness ROI; anchor any advocacy to MacroPolo's real figures, not the inflated '70%'.
What would prove it wrong (falsifier). MacroPolo's next edition shows the foreign-national share collapsing, or Yang Zhilin's biography is materially different from the CMU/Recurrent AI/Moonshot record.
Live-status check + triangulation. Moonshot's founder Yang Zhilin (杨植麟) — first author of Transformer-XL and XLNet — did his PhD at Carnegie Mellon (2019) and returned to China, where he built a ~$20B frontier lab (correcting the episode's 'Yang Xilin' and its garbled chronology). MacroPolo's tracker is the settling primary on the asymmetry: no clean '70% non-citizen' figure exists; verified are that ~42% of top-tier researchers work outside their home country and ~75% of US-based top-tier talent is of American or Chinese origin. Green-card-stapling is the low-friction retention lever. Source: Primary · MacroPolo Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0 (2024-03-06); see source link. Every post-cutoff figure was tool-fetched against a live source during the Kimi K3 sweep (2026-07-20); see sweeps/2026-07-20-VERIFIED_DIGEST.md for the full provenance and any corrections of record.
Frame high-skill immigration as measurable AI-competitiveness ROI; anchor any advocacy to MacroPolo's real figures, not the inflated '70%'.
domains: geopolitics · open-weights · compute