17-Year-Old Chinese Prodigy Behind Musk-Praised “Kimi Shock” Paper Rumored to Join Google Alumni Startup

SCMP: “Joined Discovery Loop”
Joined Moonshot at 16, co-first author of key paper
Leaves Moonshot for U.S.; denies Anthropic rumors

A 17-year-old researcher who helped develop Kimi K3 at Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI has reportedly left the company and moved to a U.S. startup founded by former Google employees.

On Oct. 21, Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post (SCMP) reported that a social media account called “Aper Grok,” which tracks the movement of AI talent in the United States, had posted that 17-year-old Chen Guangyu had joined Discovery Loop. However, Chen has not publicly disclosed his next destination, and Discovery Loop has said it does not comment on individuals’ personal information, so the report has not been confirmed.

Teenager recruited at hackathon played key role in core Kimi K3 paper

China's AI company Moonshot AI, which sparked a "Kimi shock" with its open-weight model Kimi K3. Reuters-Yonhap

Chen took part in an AI hackathon for middle school students hosted by Moonshot in 2025. His technical posts on social media led to an internship at a Silicon Valley AI startup. Moonshot decided to recruit him after reviewing his GitHub code and technical notes on social media. He joined the Kimi team as a machine learning researcher in November 2025 and was assigned directly to a core technical project without new-employee training. He was 16 at the time.

In March 2026, Chen was named a co-first author of the Kimi team’s paper “Attention Residuals.” The paper proposed a design that improves computational efficiency by about 25%, became the foundation for Kimi K3’s architecture, and listed Chen ahead of Moonshot co-founders including Yang Zhilin. Tesla CEO Elon Musk also praised the research. In July 2026, Moonshot released Kimi K3, an open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters, causing a “Kimi shock” across the industry.

"Grateful they believed in me at 16"... Is his next stop Jeff Dean's company?

On Oct. 15, Chen announced that he had left Moonshot. “The year I spent at Kimi was the best time of my life so far,” he said. “I’m especially grateful that they believed in me and hired me when I was 16.” He also said he wanted to explore a wider range of possibilities in the future.

After he mentioned that he would be heading to the San Francisco Bay Area in California, some speculated that he might be joining Anthropic. In response to a comment asking about it, he replied directly, “There’s no way.”

Jeff Dean, invited to speak at a special lecture hosted by KAIST and the National AI Research Hub at Seoul AI Hub last August. KAIST

Discovery Loop, the company he is rumored to have joined, is an AI startup founded in August 2026 by four former Google researchers, including Jeff Dean. It aims to automate the scientific research process using AI and has not yet released a product. In September 2026, U.S. publication Business Insider (BI) reported that the company was seeking investment at a target valuation of $50 billion (approximately 66 trillion won).

Meanwhile, Moonshot is preparing to list on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. According to Bloomberg, the company has confidentially filed for a Hong Kong listing and is reportedly aiming to raise up to $5 billion (approximately 6.6 trillion won) and go public in the first quarter of 2027. Its valuation in its most recent private funding round was about $50 billion, a significant increase from $31.5 billion (approximately 4.1 trillion won) when it raised funds in the summer of 2026. Its annual recurring revenue (ARR) stands at $1 billion (approximately 1.32 trillion won) and is expected to reach $2 billion (approximately 2.64 trillion won) by the end of 2026.

This content was produced with the assistance of AI translation services.