CMU professor calls ex-student 'exceptionally talented' after Kimi K3 launch

After the launch of Kimi K3, Carnegie Mellon University professor Russ Salakhutdinov publicly congratulated Yang Zhilin and the team at Moonshot AI. He called the release "a huge win for the open-source community." Salakhutdinov was one of Yang's two PhD advisors at CMU (the other being William W. Cohen).

He also noted that Yang completed his PhD in just four years, making "truly foundational contributions to machine learning" while at CMU.

Later, Salakhutdinov added that he's often asked whether Yang was his PhD student. His answer: "Yes, and he's exceptionally talented."

He then listed some of his other former students, including Adam optimizer co-creator and xAI co-founder Jimmy Ba; Mistral 7B paper author and Thinking Machines Lab founding team member Devendra Chaplot; and MIT assistant professor Paul Liang.