Pengfei Wan is a computer vision and multimodal AI researcher who leads the Kling models team at Kuaishou Technology, the organization responsible for developing Kling AI, Kuaishou's generative video platform.
Wan is one of the most publicly identifiable technical leaders associated with Kling AI. During Kling's 2024 launch period, Kuaishou identified him as the head of its Visual Generation and Interaction Center, the technical organization behind the company's visual-generation and multimodal interaction work. In his current professional profile, Wan states that he leads the Kling models team, also known as the Kling Team.
It is important to distinguish Wan's role from the term "inventor." The available public evidence does not establish a single individual as the inventor or founder of Kling AI. Instead, Kling was developed by a larger Kuaishou research and engineering organization. Wan is best described as the technical leader of that team rather than the sole inventor of Kling.
Wan's academic background is in electrical engineering, computer vision and machine learning. He earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Science and Technology of China (USTC) and his Ph.D. from the Department of Electronic and Computer Engineering at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST).
Before joining Kuaishou, Wan served as head of the AI department, known as MT Lab, at Meitu. His research interests include computer vision, computer graphics, embodied AI and multimodal machine learning.
Under the Kling Team, Wan has been associated with research covering video generation, multimodal visual-language systems, video understanding, controllable generation, motion control, multimodal interaction and emerging world-model research.
Kling's research organization has grown substantially since the public launch of Kling in June 2024. The team's publications include the Kling-Omni Technical Report, which describes a generalist framework for generating high-fidelity video from multimodal visual-language inputs. Wan is also among the authors of later Kling Team research covering areas such as character animation and motion control.
The Kling Team's research direction has expanded beyond simple text-to-video generation. Its stated objectives now include multimodal understanding and reasoning, multimodal generation and interaction, embodied AI and robot learning. Wan's own profile describes the team's broader ambition as building multimodal world models that can advance both digital and physical intelligence.
Kling's development therefore represents a team-based research effort rather than the work of one publicly documented inventor. Researchers and engineers across Kuaishou have contributed to the model family and its supporting technologies, while Wan has emerged as the clearest publicly documented technical leader.
For Artificial Intelligence Files, the most accurate description is therefore: Pengfei Wan is the technical leader of Kuaishou's Kling models team and one of the key publicly identifiable figures behind the development of Kling AI, rather than a documented sole inventor or founder of the product.
