Nathan Chen, Chinese AI prodigy, is said to have joined Discovery Loop, a startup co-founded by "AI genius" Le Viet Quoc.

On October 20, Arfur Grok, a famous social network account specializing in tracking the movement of AI talent in the US, said that Nathan Chen, a former Moonshot AI researcher, will join Discovery Loop.

Previously, Chen 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.

When SCMP contacted, Chen did not comment, and the Discovery Loop representative said he "did not want to discuss personnel issues".

According to Axios, Arfur Grok accurately reported on some recent AI talent recruitment deals in Silicon Valley, such as researcher Luke Metz leaving OpenAI to join Meta Superintelligence Labs in August; or researcher Andrew Tulloch left Meta to join Anthropic in September. This site assessed that Chen's move to Discovery Loop was "not surprising", as the company currently has a great attraction for global AI talent.

Born in 2009, Chen interned at a startup in Silicon Valley before coming to Moonshot AI in 2025 and was honored by Rhodes Trust Rise Fellow - a global talent program for teenagers aged 15 to 17, sponsored by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and his wife Wendy Schmidt.

Although still young, Chen is one of the researchers behind the success of the famous Kimi K3 model, helping the product compete fairly against strong American competitors such as OpenAI's GPT or Anthropic's Claude. Despite his short one-year stint, he contributed significantly to some of Moonshot AI's core technical innovations, helping the Kimi model become one of the world's leading open weighting systems.

Meanwhile, the new Discovery Loop company was founded in August by a group of former Google leaders including Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Le Viet Quoc - who is called "AI monster". The startup aims to "solve humanity's most difficult problems".

Although there are no products yet, Discovery Loop is receiving great attention. According to Business Insider, the company is valued at $50 billion after the first round of funding, led by Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Google. In August, Jeff Dean said the company's immediate task is to strive to achieve RSI (recursive self-improvement) - the ability to automate AI development through AI itself. This goal is set by many leading AI companies both in the US and China.

"By building a model that's really good at understanding science and engineering, you can help a model achieve a PhD-equivalent level of expertise in many different fields," Dean said at the time.

Bao Lam summary

• The 17-year-old AI prodigy suddenly left the Chinese company