Key points
- Nathan Chen leaves Moonshot AI at 17
- Chen's next employer remains unconfirmed
- What Chen worked on at Moonshot
- Carnegie study tracks where China-educated researchers work
Nathan Chen joined Moonshot AI at 16 while still in high school. Now 17, the researcher has left the Chinese startup and says he is heading to the San Francisco Bay Area, but he hasn't named his next employer.
An anonymous account that tracks AI hiring, Arfur Grok, claimed on Tuesday, Oct. 20, that Chen would join Discovery Loop, the US startup founded by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, the South China Morning Post reported. Neither Chen nor Discovery Loop has confirmed the claim. The company declined to comment on personnel matters.
Chen's planned move comes as a Carnegie Endowment study finds a growing share of China-educated AI researchers working in China. Among NeurIPS paper authors with undergraduate degrees from China, 69% of the 2025 conference group worked there in 2026, compared with 57% of the 2022 group in 2023. That sample differs from Chen, who joined Moonshot while still in high school.
Chen joined Moonshot at 16
Chen joined the Kimi team at Moonshot in November 2025 as a machine learning researcher, according to Hankyoreh. He worked on the underlying architecture of Kimi K3, the 2.8 trillion-parameter open-weight model Moonshot released in July. Moonshot has said K3 comes close to the top US models on some tasks.
He announced his departure on X, writing that the past year had been the best of his life and thanking Moonshot for hiring him at 16.
Chen, whose Chinese name is Chen Guangyu, ruled out Anthropic when another user asked whether he was joining the company.
Chen got into AI through a hackathon in middle school and taught himself through open-source projects on GitHub. He did a seven-week internship in Silicon Valley and then applied to DeepSeek and Moonshot.
Moonshot senior researcher Du Yulun wrote that he and Chen had "several long conversations about his decision" and that it was "best for [Chen] to explore and follow his new curiosity as much as possible at his age."
Discovery Loop is two months old
Dean and three other former Google researchers, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, started Discovery Loop in August. The company wants to automate scientific research with AI by running experiments in a loop with less human involvement each cycle. Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures led its first round, and Alphabet (GOOGL) also invested.
Discovery Loop hasn't released a product. In September, Business Insider reported that the company was seeking a valuation of about $50 billion, up from the roughly $10 billion it discussed in August, as we covered at the time.
Moonshot is preparing a Hong Kong IPO, and its founders are in talks to settle a shareholder dispute before the listing.
