The AI industry in the US has been completely disappointed after China’s Moonshot AI claimed that its Kimi K3 can compete with OpenAI and Anthropic. Sadly, Moonshot AI’s Zilin Yang studied in the US but then founded his company in China. Several prominent industry voices said it was America’s loss that the US could not retain top talent like Yang, while many complained that Yang may have found the immigration standoff in the US difficult and decided to go home.Yang’s PhD supervisor at Carnegie Mellon University, Russ Salakhutdinov, broke his silence on the debate and said it was not true that Yang was not offered a job in the US. He explained that Yang was determined to start his own company in China and was not to be denied a visa for such a talent who completed his PhD in four years.There was no H-1B lottery or any factors like that, Russ said. The professor said, “Zhilin had many opportunities to stay in the US if he wanted. In fact, I was on an email thread with a senior Apple executive (Tim Cook reports) asking if Zhilin would consider joining Apple. I said he wanted to move back to his homeland. The answer was, OK, we have an office in Beijing if he wanted to join there.”“But Zhilin was quite determined to go back and build a startup. I remember him telling me that if he didn’t at least try to start his own company, he would regret it for the rest of his life. I respect that, and he was right.”“Many of my international PhD students choose to stay in the US. Of course the US immigration process can be quite scary and uncertain, even for superstar PhD graduates from places like CMU,” the professor said, describing what happens to many PhD students, but that was not the case for Yang.The debate on social media was not limited to abuse, as former White House AI and cryptocurrency czar David Sachs commented that the US is “tying itself in knots” over AI and putting its competitive edge at risk. Although he did not address the immigration issue, his criticism of policy obstacles was sharp.Venture capitalist social platformHe added, “This is how you lose the AI race.” “If we tie ourselves down, the rest of the world won’t play by our rules. Permissionless innovation is how the US conquered the Internet and became the technological envy of the world. We can do it again with AI – addressing the risks in a targeted way – or we’ll see our edge evaporate.”