Moonshot AI's 17-year-old Kimi K3 co-author Chen Guangyu heads to Jeff Dean's Discovery Loop

Chen Guangyu, the 17-year-old AI researcher who co-authored Attention Residuals, a core architectural technique behind Moonshot AI's 2.8-trillion-parameter Kimi K3 model, announced his departure from Moonshot AI on October 15 via X, thanking colleagues including Du Yulun, who hired him at age 16. He said he was heading to the Bay Area but did not name his next employer. Multiple reports, including one citing the AI talent-tracking account Apper Grok, identified Discovery Loop as his destination; as of October 21, Chen had not publicly confirmed the move and Discovery Loop declined to comment on personnel matters.

At Moonshot AI, Chen was a co-first author alongside Zhang Yu and Su Jianlin of the paper Attention Residuals. He first drew industry attention after participating in a Moonshot AI-hosted AI hackathon for middle school students. After his departure announcement, Anthropic's Sholto Douglas publicly invited him to work in San Francisco; Chen declined and later refuted rumors he would join Anthropic.

Discovery Loop was founded in August by Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, all former Google researchers, and pursues AI-driven automation of scientific and engineering research, which Dean has likened to recursive self-improvement of AI. The company has not launched a product but is reportedly seeking funding at a target valuation of about $50 billion. Moonshot AI is reportedly preparing for a Hong Kong Stock Exchange listing, aiming to raise up to $5 billion. The move, if confirmed, would mark a notable case of a China-trained young researcher crossing to a U.S. frontier lab amid intense AI talent competition, and underscores Discovery Loop's appetite for researchers with hands-on experience at scale.

(Source：Vector Wire)