I Staked My Reputation on This Intern — and He Co-Founded Kimi

Recursive co-founder and former Meta FAIR research director Tian Yuandong recalls that in 2015, Moonshot AI co-founder Wu Yuxin was his intern. To convince his superiors to hire Wu, he argued for an hour on the roof of Facebook’s office building and ultimately staked his own reputation. He says he was proven right.

Wu later joined FAIR, co-proposed Group Normalization with Kaiming He, and created Detectron2. Now he works on Kimi’s foundation model at Moonshot AI.

Tian believes the era of large models demands hands-on practitioners — people who look at data, write code, and iterate quickly. Founders are no exception.