title: @ruima: This is a translated article from Chinese, originally published by Renwu , a res...
author: ruima
content_type: twitter_article
published: 2026-04-01T07:38:24+00:00
source_url: https://x.com/ruima/status/2039245985520681257
word_count: 6766
This is a translated article from Chinese, originally published by Renwu , a respected Chinese magaz
This is a translated article from Chinese, originally published by Renwu , a respected Chinese magazine known for reported features and profile writing. It has been adapted for readers who may not know the Chinese context, company culture, or references. I’ve made it more readable, added brief context where needed, and smoothed some phrases that would sound strange if translated directly.
By Liu Mo
Edited by Jin Zha Originally published in Chinese by Renwu (人物) on March 31, 2026
Spring 2026 has been unusually kind to Kimi.
In just a few months, the company behind Kimi seemed to hit one milestone after another. Its revenue, fundraising, and valuation all kept breaking records. A research paper co-authored by a 17-year-old high school intern received praise from Silicon Valley figures including Elon Musk. And Cursor, the U.S. coding startup valued at around $50 billion, was accused by Chinese observers of essentially “wrapping” or heavily relying on Kimi’s model as part of its own product experience. In other words, Kimi suddenly seemed to be winning on all three fronts at once: capital, technology, and commercial traction.
This startup is only three years old. Its valuation has already surpassed RMB 120 billion, or roughly $16 billion. It is becoming impossible to ignore in the global AI story.
And yet Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi, remains deeply mysterious.
I was given permission to spend 100 hours observing the company from the inside. As an independent writer, I was allowed to interview any employee willing to talk, sit in on any meeting that did not involve trade secrets, and write freely afterward. No one would edit my work. I would not be paid. That, it turns out, is very much in character for this company.
Inside the office, it feels like standing in the eye of a storm.
At the center, everything is strangely still. The desks are quiet. Only scattered keyboard sounds break the silence. Occasionally you hear someone laugh. But the noise outside, the rumors, arguments, hype, imitation, and endless commentary, seems to leave no trace here.
There are just over 300 employees. Their average age is under 30. Each person, if you divide the company valuation by headcount, is effectively carrying close to RMB 400 million in enterprise value on their shoulders.
About 80% of the staff are what Chinese internet slang calls “I people,” meaning introverts, borrowing from MBTI language. People sit side by side, but they are more comfortable typing than talking. Here, introversion is not treated as a flaw. It is almost an operating protocol.
I thought back to my first visit in 2024, on a night when the storm was only beginning to gather. At the time, I did not come away with a particularly positive first impression.
“DeepSeek saved us”
The night of December 24, 2024, was Christmas Eve, though for most people in China it was not a holiday that mattered much. For Julian, it became one of the darkest nights of her life.
She was 26, had graduated from Peking University only two years earlier, and had no prior industry experience. Yet she was already one of the earliest employees at Kimi. That night, this very young yet already “senior” employee sat at the long table in a conference room called Radiohead, crying in front of more than 30 colleagues.
She still had not delivered a holiday marketing plan that met the standards of the co-founders.
Chinese New Year was only a month away. The latest plan had already been revised six times, and now it needed to be upgraded again, perhaps even scrapped entirely. The odds of rebuilding it from scratch and then coordinating product and engineering to execute it in time were slim. But the company had high hopes for growth during the 2025 Lunar New Year period.
That mattered because the previous Lunar New Year had been a breakthrough moment for Kimi. It had gone viral in China thanks to its branding around handling “2 million Chinese characters of long-context input,” which was unusually advanced at the time. Consumer users surged, and in the Chinese stock market people even started talking about “Kimi concept stocks,” meaning public companies loosely associated with the trend.
That weekly meeting was long and brutal.
Around 20 young employees, most as inexperienced as Julian, took turns reporting on everything: social media ads, user operations, PR in China, overseas marketing, all the details. The group discussed everything collectively, and the co-founders made the final calls.
Kimi at that point felt like an adolescent: talented, full of potential, but not yet fully in control of itself. Even with a monthly advertising budget of tens of millions of RMB, it still looked clumsy in the face of fast-rising competitors.
The meeting ended around 4 a.m.
No one knows whether Julian’s final plan would have succeeded. A month later, it no longer mattered.
That was when the world first heard the name DeepSeek.
Hayley, who worked on growth, went home to Wenzhou for the holiday and found that relatives and friends all asked the same question: “Have you heard of DeepSeek?” It was as if Kimi had suddenly become yesterday’s news.
She says that was the hardest Lunar New Year of her life. The silence inside the company was deafening.
The annual company meeting is usually held in March, after the holiday. Employees are allowed to challenge management directly. That year, almost every question revolved around DeepSeek.
The sharpest question came from the HR team. With complete sincerity, they said the uncomfortable thing out loud:
“How are we supposed to answer candidates when they ask: DeepSeek also gave me an offer. Why should I join Kimi instead?”
But not everyone reacted the same way.
Alex from the algorithm team says that if he felt any strong emotion during the “DeepSeek moment,” it was not fear. It was excitement.
That feeling was not just personal. It reflected the mood of much of the algorithm team. DeepSeek had shown that there might be another way: lower-cost strategies, open-source approaches, and a truth many people had doubted before. A little-known Chinese startup, if its technology was strong enough and its model was good enough, could still earn global respect.
The product team was not especially anxious either. Kevin, one of the earliest product employees, believed that DeepSeek had broken out because of its model. Once Kimi’s own model capabilities caught up, he believed the product team would have even more room to build useful features on top.
No outsider knows exactly what discussions the co-founders had. But the company moved quickly. It adjusted strategy, narrowed focus, and reached something close to full internal alignment.
Ask almost anyone inside the company what matters most now, and they will answer without hesitation: the model.
From then on, you could feel a growing respect for DeepSeek inside Kimi. Part of it was professional admiration. Part of it was something else.
As Alex put it:
“In a way, DeepSeek saved us.”
Taste is all you need
“Why are you wearing shoes like that?”
After Ezra asked me that, I was more surprised than she was. On her floor of the office, almost everyone keeps a pair of slippers under the desk. Comfortable clothes and shoes, people believe, make you more relaxed, more focused, and more creative.
This is the dress code of smart people.
I have met many high-achieving students in my life. But the “good students” here are a very different species.
When Ezra was in elementary school, she tried to hack the family computer because her parents would not tell her the password. In middle school she became interested in Bitcoin, when one coin cost only a few hundred RMB. She asked her mother for spending money to invest; her mother told her it was a scam. In high school, the first time she ever took a taxi, she sketched out a ride-hailing product concept. Had today’s AI tools existed back then, she says, maybe she could have launched it. Once she finally had some money of her own in college, she put it into the Chinese stock market and lost 90%.
That disaster taught her something about the limits of human judgment, and pushed her toward AI.
Her view of AGI, or artificial general intelligence, is simple: create “N Einsteins” and use them to solve humanity’s hardest problems. From that point on, she became determined to find a company that would truly push the limits of AGI. This was despite the fact that she had already made her investment losses back in the stock market.
Because of her strong academic background, she received offers from many companies. She chose Kimi for one reason: during the interview, she was deeply impressed by founder Yang Zhilin’s understanding of technology and his seriousness about details. She felt he genuinely cared about models. He did not have the restlessness often seen in smart people, nor the utilitarian instinct common in businesspeople. In fact, by the end of the interview, she still did not know he was the founder.
Karen’s personality is different but leads to a similar place.
He was rebellious from childhood. He argued with teachers. He never listened to his parents. As a student, he insisted on going abroad. After graduating, he insisted on starting a business. The comfortable and stable life offered by a big Chinese tech company made him despair. He did not want a life whose ending was visible from the beginning.
I asked him: if given the choice between a guaranteed 60 out of 100, and a 1% chance at 100 out of 100, which would you choose?
He chose the latter without hesitation.
It was not that he could not tolerate a score of 60. He just hated the certainty of that 100% path.
That founder-like DNA forms part of the company’s underlying texture. By rough internal count, at least 50 people at Moonshot AI have founded or joined startups before.
Kimi, apparently, likes hiring CEOs.
A more accurate way to put it is this: the company shelters a rotating population of gifted drifters. A genius is not necessarily a top student or model employee. What matters is that in some dimension, they can see through time.
At a company where around 80% of employees come from China’s elite “985” and “211” universities, Yannis’s résumé does not look especially impressive. Yet as early as 2023, he had already predicted in engineering communities that both DeepSeek and Kimi would rise, at a time when model companies barely had products at all. Another employee, himself born after 2000, noticed Yannis’s insight and recommended him internally.
Karen says too many smart people get trapped by systems. First the family, then school, then the workplace. They obey group expectations without realizing it and lose sight of what they actually want. Only a small number try to escape, and even they often go unseen.
One of Kimi’s missions, he says, is to see them.
Without that instinct, a 17-year-old high school student would never have been brought in as a Kimi intern, collaborated with the team, and published a paper that later drew praise from Elon Musk. The person who put that student’s name first on the paper was Bob, the mentor who first spotted him.
There is only a thin line between genius and madness. When an “ununderstood madman” arrives at Moonshot AI, he may suddenly become a world-changing genius. Or perhaps some still-hidden genius can only truly bloom in a place like this.
Bob told me that, to some extent, having a big ego is not a problem. It may even be a good sign. If that ego functions as inner drive, if someone believes they must be part of a great mission, that may be exactly the sort of person the company cannot afford to miss.
Geniuses are obsessive.
Inside this team, training a top AI model is jokingly called “alchemy,” a common Chinese tech term for the mysterious, half-scientific, half-artistic process of model training. But in practice, alchemy means constantly fixing bugs.
Once a flagship training run begins, Bob and his teammates fall into the same ritual. The first thing they do every morning is refresh the company’s massive set of internal monitoring dashboards. Hundreds of thousands of metrics. If even one curve spikes abnormally, alarms go off in their heads. Was there a problem in optimization? A flaw in the architecture? A mismatch in numerical precision?
They react with almost animal sensitivity.
Some people even inspect training data token by token, printing out those that produced extreme gradients and interrogating them like suspects: why did you jump so violently?
Everyone who has ever truly participated in “delivering” one of these models has lived through this kind of sleepless tension. It is not really anxiety. It is curiosity driving obsession. That obsessive vigilance is part of what pushed the model toward top-tier performance.
Geniuses cluster.
Over the past year, more than 100 of Kimi’s hires came through referrals, friends or friends of friends. Inside the company, this is jokingly called “human-to-human transmission.”
Trust, because of these dense networks, becomes a natural organizational asset.
In essence, Kimi shifts the hardest part of management onto recruiting. If people are brought in by trusted peers, they are more likely to share the same instincts. This is why one word comes up over and over inside the company:
Taste.