The prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley is that Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 got here out of nowhere. However the reality is that even in case you by no means journey to China, there’s a simple approach to get a way of what Chinese language AI researchers are up to: log on to X.
In the previous 12 months, I’ve seen a gradual improve of Chinese language synthetic intelligence researchers becoming a member of X and collaborating in the wider discourse about AI improvement and commercialization. Take Moonshot AI, the firm behind Kimi K3, for instance. On Thursday, I used to be in a position to shortly discover round 30 accounts on X run by individuals who declare to be at the moment affiliated with Moonshot, together with two of the startup’s cofounders, in addition to half a dozen former workers and collaborators. And these are not dormant accounts: They discuss Moonshot’s massive releases and incremental analysis papers, make pals with Western researchers, and share details about their private life and hobbies.
Moonshot is arguably the Chinese language AI lab that’s most lively on X, however you’ll simply discover executives and technical employees from different main Chinese language startups, like Minimax and Z.ai. Even a number of workers at DeepSeek, who reportedly are unable to depart China as a result of the authorities confiscated their passports, commonly put up on X about the newest AI information and share job listings to recruit new expertise.
“X is the greatest group” for AI discussions proper now, says Meng Fanqing, cofounder of the startup Evolvent AI and a former intern at Moonshot, the place he labored on the Kimi K2.5 mannequin. “There are each Chinese language and abroad audiences, and the advice algorithm works fairly properly for exhibiting you content material in the similar circle that you simply are in,” he says. In contrast with Chinese language platforms, the place it’s typically exhausting to have severe technical discussions, Chinese language researchers like Meng say they might fairly spend their time on X.
Meng says he began actively posting on X in mid-2025. At the begin of the 12 months, DeepSeek’s R1 mannequin went viral round the world, shining a vibrant highlight on China’s AI business. Many Chinese language researchers seized the second and joined X to begin sharing their perspective. “Round that point, all the Chinese language researchers are beginning to take into consideration branding on a world degree,” Meng says.
Chinese language AI researchers may be serving to fill a rising hole left by researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, who’ve turn out to be extra reluctant to share their pondering on-line as their employers have grown into behemoth corporations, says Tiezhen Wang, an unbiased AI analyst and former researcher at Hugging Face. “I assume they really feel that their mannequin structure and the way they prepare the mannequin is sort of a secret, in order that they’re posting much less,” Wang explains. In consequence, Chinese language researchers are getting extra consideration from audiences on X who are hungry to make sense of what’s occurring in the fast-moving world of AI.
Why Select X?
One motive X might have turn out to be well-liked amongst Chinese language AI researchers is that there’s not actually a comparable social platform in China for high-quality technical discussions about AI and different rising applied sciences.
Some individuals say they used to put up on Zhihu, a Quora-like platform that when branded itself as the premier vacation spot for educated professionals to present and inform. However since 2020, Zhihu has more and more pivoted to internet hosting fiction content material, and knowledgeable contributors have steadily fallen off. For instance, Deng Yu, a Chinese language mathematician who was awarded a Fields Medal this 12 months, publicly wrote on Zhihu in 2018 that he determined to cease posting on the web site due to the rise of low-quality content material.
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