Ex-Moonshot AI Chinese Prodigy Spotted at New Startup, Stirring Social Media Buzz

Speculation has arisen that a teenage prodigy who left the Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) startup Moonshot AI has joined a U.S. startup.

According to outlets like the South China Morning Post on the 21st (local time), "Upper Grok," a social media account tracking AI talent job movements, reported that Chen Guangyu (17), formerly of Moonshot AI, has joined the U.S. startup Discovery Loop.

Discovery Loop was founded last August by four former Google researchers, including Jeff Dean, and pursues AI-based scientific research automation.

Although the company has not yet launched a product, it was reported last month that it is seeking fundraising with a target valuation of 50 billion dollars (approx. 66 trillion won).

Chen recently announced his departure from Moonshot via social media, stating, "I am especially grateful for trusting and hiring me when I was just 16 years old."

Chen had been working as a machine learning researcher on Moonshot AI's Kimi team since November of last year, deeply participating in the R&D of the foundational architecture for Kimi K3.

Last July, Moonshot unveiled Kimi K3, one of the world's largest open-weight AI models equipped with 2.8 trillion parameters, claiming it showed performance close to top-tier U.S. models.

Amid the competition between the U.S. and China to secure AI talent, attention focused on whether he would move to Anthropic after stating he would "head to the Bay Area" (San Francisco, California), but when asked by some figures in the comments, Chen denied it, saying, "No way."

However, Chen himself has not yet revealed his specific destination, and Discovery Loop has maintained its stance that it will not comment on personal matters.

(Photo: AP, Yonhap News)
※ Please note: This article was translated by AI and may contain errors.