The prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley is that Chinese AI models like Kimi K3 and DeepSeek R1 came out of nowhere. But the truth is that even if you never travel to China, there’s an easy way to get a sense of what Chinese AI researchers are up to: log on to X.
In the past year, I’ve seen a steady increase of Chinese artificial intelligence researchers joining X and participating in the wider discourse about AI development and commercialization. Take Moonshot AI, the company behind Kimi K3, as an example. On Thursday, I was able to quickly find around 30 accounts on X run by people who claim to be currently affiliated with Moonshot, including two of the startup’s cofounders, as well as half a dozen former employees and collaborators. And these are not dormant accounts: They talk about Moonshot’s big releases and incremental research papers, make friends with Western researchers, and share details about their personal life and hobbies.
Moonshot is arguably the Chinese AI lab that’s most active on X, but you will easily find executives and technical staff from other leading Chinese startups, like Minimax and Z.ai. Even several employees at DeepSeek, who reportedly are unable to leave China because the government confiscated their passports, regularly post on X about the latest AI news and share job listings to recruit new talent.
“X is the best community” for AI discussions right now, says Meng Fanqing, cofounder of the startup Evolvent AI and a former intern at Moonshot, where he worked on the Kimi K2.5 model. “There are both Chinese and overseas audiences, and the recommendation algorithm works pretty well for showing you content in the same circle that you are in,” he says. Compared with Chinese platforms, where it’s often hard to have serious technical discussions, Chinese researchers like Meng say they would rather spend their time on X.
Meng says he started actively posting on X in mid-2025. At the start of the year, DeepSeek’s R1 model went viral around the world, shining a bright spotlight on China’s AI industry. Many Chinese researchers seized the moment and joined X to start sharing their perspective. “Around that time, all the Chinese researchers are starting to think about branding on an international level,” Meng says.
Chinese AI researchers may also be helping fill a growing gap left by researchers at OpenAI and Anthropic, who have become more reluctant to share their thinking online as their employers have grown into behemoth companies, says Tiezhen Wang, an independent AI analyst and former researcher at Hugging Face. “I guess they feel that their model architecture and how they train the model is kind of a secret, so they're posting less,” Wang explains. As a result, Chinese researchers are getting more attention from audiences on X who are hungry to make sense of what’s happening in the fast-moving world of AI.
Why Choose X?
One reason X may have become popular among Chinese AI researchers is that there’s not really a comparable social platform in China for high-quality technical discussions about AI and other emerging technologies.
Some people say they used to post on Zhihu, a Quora-like platform that once branded itself as the premier destination for educated professionals to show and tell. But since 2020, Zhihu has increasingly pivoted to hosting fiction content, and expert contributors have gradually fallen off. For example, Deng Yu, a Chinese mathematician who was awarded a Fields Medal this year, publicly wrote on Zhihu in 2018 that he decided to stop posting on the site due to the rise of low-quality content.
Xiaohongshu, or RedNote, is another social platform that has become increasingly popular among the young, urban, and educated classes in China. Some junior AI researchers have opened accounts on Xiaohongshu recently and use them to share details about their work, but the audience is less technical than what they might find on X.
When Moonshot published a new research paper in March, it caused quite a stir on both Chinese and Western social media, even attracting praise from Elon Musk. But “almost everyone on Zhihu and Xiaohongshu were talking about the background and age of the authors—one of them is only 17—and who their parents are, things that I find very superficial and gossipy,” says a current researcher at Moonshot who requested anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to media. “It was the foreign readers who actually discussed technical details and praised its breakthroughs.” He says readers on Zhihu also tend to be more mean-spirited, and the platform is plagued by higher amounts of AI slop than X.
Moonshot did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Chinese newcomers have generally received a warm welcome from academics and researchers at Western AI companies who were already on X, many of whom have been eager for direct information about Chinese AI labs. “Before they all came to X, we already saw a lot of influential researchers translating Chinese [AI] blogs into English,” says Wang. He points to Su Jianlin, a well-respected AI researcher who keeps an active blog in Chinese documenting his thoughts, as an example of the kind of voices that Western AI communities crave. Now, Su is working for Moonshot and has a public X account, too.
Other Incentives
Beyond the desire to participate in open discussions, Chinese AI companies are also finding that X is an effective place to market themselves and their products. “X is the platform with the highest traffic and exposure. To some extent, the AI industry works just like the finance industry now; each individual and company needs their own branding,” says Meng.
When AI researchers become minor social media celebrities, that helps boost the profile of their employers too. Wang says he personally advised Moonshot during a one-off consultation session for the company in 2025 to push more of its researchers to the front on social media. When a startup releases a new model or paper, “it’s more interesting to see what they as a person want to post, instead of the official announcement,” Wang says, “And this would definitely help them gather more feedback from the audience. And they can talk to other researchers and potentially trigger some collaboration.”
Moonshot has already proven that it has an ample supply of charismatic personalities. The company is often described in Chinese media as one of the AI labs with the most interesting internal cultures, where the CEO plastered his office with band posters and other souvenirs celebrating his love for rock music. The Chinese name of the company, 月之暗面, literally comes from Pink Floyd’s album The Dark Side of the Moon.
Having Chinese AI researchers explain their work in their own words on X is a net benefit for the United States, Wang says, because it reduces the need for blind speculation about what Chinese AI labs are doing. “People have a lot of wrong hallucinations about what China is doing. And now, X is the door for them to better understand China,” Wang says.
This is an edition of Zeyi Yang and Louise Matsakis’ Made in China newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.
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