Kimi Yang Zhilin: Open source models are becoming the new standard, and AI will play a bigger role in research in the future.

On March 25th, at the opening ceremony of the 2026 Zhongguancun Forum, Yang Zhilin, founder and CEO of the Dark Side of the Moon, gave a keynote speech on open source AI. He stated that the open source model represented by Kimi K2.5 is becoming a new standard, and hardware manufacturers often need to prove their performance improvement through open source model evaluation sets. In addition, he believes that the research methods in the current AI field are changing. Previously, the industry relied more on large amounts of internet data and a small amount of manual labeling, with humans judging whether it conforms to human values and preferences. Since last year, the industry has been paying more attention to reinforcement learning, but it is still humans selecting high quality tasks, and the improvement in the fields of programming and mathematics is coming from this. Next, AI will play a greater role in research, with each researcher equipped with a large number of tokens to synthesize new tasks and environments. AI will define the most suitable reward function in this environment and even explore new network architectures. Under this premise, the entire AI research and development process will gradually accelerate.