Nathan Chen, the researcher behind the success of the Kimi K3 model, announced that he was leaving the Moonshot AI company after less than a year of work, raising many speculations about the next stop of this teenage prodigy.

SCMP reported that Nathan Chen, a 17-year-old artificial intelligence researcher, announced that he was leaving Moonshot AI to move to the US, causing a stir in the technology community amid fierce competition between Silicon Valley and Chinese technology centers.

Sharing on social media on October 15, Chen said he left the Beijing-based startup after less than a year and described his time working here as "the best year of my life so far."

The announcement caught many in the industry by surprise, especially as Chen had only been on the job for a short time and Moonshot AI was preparing to go public in Hong Kong after a series of successful products, including the latest K3 model launched in July.

Despite his short tenure, Chen has been instrumental in several of Moonshot AI's core technical innovations over the past year, helping the company's Kimi model become one of the world's leading open weighting systems. Among them is a groundbreaking technique called "attention residuals" that improves cost and memory efficiency on Moonshot's large language model. This is a breakthrough neural network architecture technique that replaces standard residual connections with an attention mechanism along the depth of the model, allowing each network layer to self-select information from previous layers instead of passively accumulating. This method has received a shower of praise from many famous names in the industry, including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and billionaire Elon Musk.

Many people started talking about Chen's next stop after a series of large companies in the US such as Anthropic or Prime Intellect commented to congratulate him and invite him to visit the San Francisco Bay area.

According to SBS, when a researcher at Anthropic asked in a comment if Chen planned to continue his studies at Carnegie Mellon University in the US and suggested he join the company, Chen replied: "I will go to the Bay area (San Francisco, California)." However, in the next post on X network on October 16, Chen denied joining the model development company Claude.

Born in 2009, Chen interned at a startup in Silicon Valley before joining Moonshot AI and was honored by Rhodes Trust Rise Fellow - a global talent program for teenagers aged 15 to 17 sponsored by former Google executive Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt.

Chen is not the first Chinese teenage AI prodigy to make headlines. Last year, Tu Jinhao, a former DeepSeek researcher, became famous after participating in writing a research paper on the Hangzhou-based startup's groundbreaking R1 model while still a high school student in Shanghai. According to information on his personal LinkedIn page, Tu left DeepSeek to go to the US to begin his studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in September 2025.

An Khang summary