Nathan Chen Guangyu, 17, who helped develop models challenging Silicon Valley rivals is reportedly joining Discovery Loop, co-founded by Vietnamese AI researcher Quoc Le and former Google researchers.
The reported move was disclosed Tuesday by Arfur Grok, an anonymous social media account that tracks AI talent movements in Silicon Valley, according to the South China Morning Post. Chen has not confirmed the appointment.
The news comes days after Chen announced his departure from Moonshot AI to pursue opportunities in the U.S., attracting attention amid intensifying competition between American and Chinese technology companies for AI talent.
Despite spending less than a year at Moonshot AI, he contributed to technical advances that improved the efficiency of its Kimi models, helping them compete with products from U.S. rivals OpenAI and Anthropic. Among his contributions was a technique called "attention residuals," designed to improve how information flows through AI models while reducing computing costs and memory requirements. The research attracted attention from prominent technology figures, including Elon Musk and former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy.
Before joining Moonshot AI in 2025, Chen interned at a Silicon Valley startup. He was also selected as a Rise Fellow, part of a global program for talented teenagers backed by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife, Wendy Schmidt.
Discovery Loop was founded in August by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, veteran engineer Sanjay Ghemawat, former Google DeepMind researcher Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le, a Vietnamese-born AI scientist and founding member of Google Brain. The startup aims to use AI to automate scientific research, developing systems capable of designing, conducting and analyzing thousands of experiments simultaneously.
Despite having yet to release a product, it was seeking new funding at a valuation of around $50 billion in September, up from the roughly $10 billion valuation discussed just weeks earlier, according to Business Insider.