实践哥MinLi (@MinLiBuilds) “Yang Zhilin has a few mentors worth naming: undergrad with Jie Tang — founder of” — TopicDigg

Yang Zhilin has a few mentors worth naming: undergrad with Jie Tang — founder of Zhipu AI; PhD at CMU, co-advised by Russ Salakhutdinov (a Hinton student) and William W. Cohen. Yang is Chinese researchers in China. Stack his academic path against the Chinese researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic in Silicon Valley, and he’s in the same tier: elite undergrad, CMU-level PhD, hard pretraining-era papers, plus big-lab research experience. With Kimi K3 just out, this is a good moment to share Andrew Ng’s short interview with Russ. It was recorded around 2017–2018, while Yang was still a PhD student at CMU. Follow the thread: what kind of advisor produces a researcher like this? You can feel Russ’s energy the whole way — especially worth watching if you care about deep learning. It’s an episode from Andrew Ng’s Heroes of Deep Learning series. At the time, Russ was still Apple’s AI Research Director and a CMU professor. About 15 minutes, fast-paced: how he got into the field, how he thinks about deep learning, and how he chooses between academia and industry. Timestamps: 1:49 — His story with Hinton on the eve of the deep learning revival 7:34 — How his view of deep learning changed, plus supervised vs. unsupervised — still sharp against today’s pretraining 10:46 — Advice for newcomers: PhD or industry for AI, and how he’s moved between both 15:05 — The research directions he was most excited about then ─── Another thread: world models. Yang has also named a unified multimodal world model as a key milestone. Kimi leans more toward long context, knowledge work, and agents operating in the digital world. The piece below is a more spatial line: Playable World — from watching a video to walking into a world. Watch the video and then read the article