China's Teenage AI Prodigy Leaves Moonshot AI, Denies Moving to U.S. Anthropic

Jeon Hyeong-u Seoul

Enlarge image

A teenage prodigy who worked at Moonshot AI, a Chinese startup that has gained attention for its high-performance artificial intelligence (AI) model "Kimi K3," has recently left the company, according to Greater China media reports.

According to Ming Pao and Lianhe Zaobao on October 18 (local time), Chen Guangyu (17), who participated in the research and development (R&D) of Kimi K3, recently announced via social media that he has "left Moonshot."

"The past year has been the best of my life," he said, adding, "I am especially grateful for trusting and hiring me when I was 16 years old."

When a researcher at the U.S. AI company Anthropic asked in a comment whether he still planned to attend Carnegie Mellon University in the U.S. and suggested that he join Anthropic, Chen expressed gratitude and replied, "I will be heading to the Bay Area (San Francisco, California)."

Consequently, amid the competition for AI talent between the U.S. and China, attention has focused on whether he would move to a U.S. company. However, when some individuals asked about the possibility of him joining Anthropic in the comments, Chen denied it, saying, "That is not happening."

Chen had been working as a machine learning researcher in Moonshot's Kimi team since November of last year and was deeply involved in the R&D of the underlying architecture for Kimi K3.

As he graduated from high school last June, there are also speculations that he will enter university after leaving Moonshot.

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

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