Yang Zhilin, Founder of fast-rising start-up Moonshot AI, has become the latest artificial intelligence entrepreneur to meet Chinese Premier Li Qiang, as the government steps up its push to accelerate the digital transformation of manufacturing. The 32-year-old was among a select group of business leaders and experts invited to a high-level symposium, where participants offered views on China’s economic resilience and future growth drivers. Li acknowledged that the external environment had become more complex and volatile this year, but said the economy had made a strong start, supported by the timely roll-out of proactive macro-economic policies. He urged a deeper implementation of the country’s “AI+” strategy, calling for faster integration of AI into manufacturing to drive digital and intelligent upgrades. The Premier also emphasized the need to combine advanced manufacturing with modern services to strengthen the broader industrial system. In addition, Li called on participants to tap into emerging sectors to create jobs, boost incomes and expand domestic demand, while encouraging entrepreneurs to play a leading role in innovation and employment.
Other attendees included Guo Lei, Chief Economist at GF Securities; Ma Guangrong, Finance Professor at Renmin University of China; and Feng Boming, Chairman of China Merchants Port Holdings. The meeting follows a series of similar engagements between senior officials and China’s emerging AI players, including MiniMax CEO Yan Junji earlier this year and DeepSeek Founder Liang Wenfeng in 2025.
Moonshot AI, the developer of the Kimi series of large language models (LLMs), has rapidly attracted investor interest. The company recently raised at least USD700 million in a new funding round that could value it at up to USD12 billion. Backers include Alibaba Group Holding, Tencent Holdings and IDG Capital. Moonshot’s latest flagship model, Kimi K2.5, has been ranked among the world’s strongest open models by benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis, trailing leading U.S. rivals by only a few months, the South China Morning Post reports.
Chinese large-language models dominated global usage rankings during the week from March 30 to April 5, with all of the top six models by token consumption coming from China, according to OpenRouter, a global large-language model (LLM) aggregation platform. Two Alibaba Qwen 3.6 series models ranked among the top three. Qwen3.6 Plus topped the list with 4.6 trillion weekly tokens, while Qwen3.6 Plus Preview ranked third with 1.64 trillion tokens. Wang Peng, Researcher at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, noted that Chinese developers account for a little over 6% of OpenRouter users, which indicates that many overseas users are adopting Chinese AI models.
