# Teen AI researcher's departure from China's Kimi lab sparks a guessing game over his next move > Chen Guangyu, the 17-year-old co-author behind a widely praised change to Moonshot AI's Kimi models, has left the company for Silicon Valley, with reports split on whether he is headed to a new Jeff Dean startup or to Anthropic. - Source: Pacific Post - Canonical URL: https://pacificpost.co.uk/article/nathan-chen-ai-prodigy-discovery-loop-destination - Author: Pacific Post Staff - Section: Technology - Published: 2026-10-20T14:50:00.000Z - Updated: 2026-10-20T14:50:00.000Z - Tags: AI, China, Silicon Valley, Moonshot AI --- A 17-year-old researcher whose work helped reshape part of a leading Chinese AI lab's model architecture has left the company, and the tech industry is still trying to work out exactly where he is headed next. Chen Guangyu, known internationally as Nathan Chen, was born in Shenzhen in 2009 and began teaching himself artificial intelligence around age 14, using large language models to work through the material on his own. A technical blog he kept drew attention from researchers after he took part in an AI hackathon in 2025, which led to an internship at a Silicon Valley start-up. By November of that year, at just 16, he had been hired as a research intern at Moonshot AI, the Beijing lab behind the Kimi family of models. At Moonshot, Chen became one of three co-first authors on a paper describing attention residuals, a technique that alters a part of large language model design, the residual connection, that had gone largely unchanged for roughly a decade. The method improved the cost-efficiency and memory use of Moonshot's models and drew public praise from prominent figures in the field, including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Tesla's Elon Musk, who called it impressive work from Kimi. Chen announced his departure from Moonshot on October 15, less than a year after joining, saying he was headed for Silicon Valley. What comes next is where the story splits. One widely shared account, from an anonymous social media tracker of AI talent moves, says he is joining Discovery Loop, a start-up founded two months ago by four researchers who left Google, including former chief scientist Jeff Dean, aimed at using AI to automate scientific and machine learning research. Other reports have instead linked him to Anthropic. Neither Chen nor either company has confirmed where he is actually going, and multiple reports have put the value of the offers he is said to have received in the millions of dollars. Whichever offer he accepts, Chen's move has become a visible marker in the broader contest between Chinese and American labs for elite AI talent, one that increasingly starts with researchers still in their teens. --- Originally published by Pacific Post. Free to cite with attribution and a link to https://pacificpost.co.uk/article/nathan-chen-ai-prodigy-discovery-loop-destination.