Ex-Meta FAIR Director Staked Reputation on Kimi Co-Founder

Yandong Tian, co-founder of Recursive and former research director at Meta FAIR, recalls that Yuxin Wu, co-founder of Moonshot AI (the company behind Kimi), was his intern in 2015. To convince his superiors to hire Wu, Tian argued for an hour on the roof of Facebook's office, ultimately staking his own reputation. He says that decision proved correct.

Wu later joined FAIR, co-proposed Group Normalization with Kaiming He, and created Detectron2. Now, he is involved in developing Kimi's foundational models at Moonshot AI.

Tian believes that in the era of large models, what's needed are hands-on practitioners who personally examine data, write code, and iterate quickly — and founders are no exception.