17-year-old Kimi researcher Nathan Chen leaves Moonshot AI for the Bay Area
On Oct. 15, 17-year-old Nathan Chen announced on X that he had left Moonshot AI's Kimi team, describing the past year as the best of his life and thanking the team for hiring him at 16. He is a co-first author of the Attention Residuals paper, which Chinese reports describe as one of the foundational technologies behind Kimi K3, and he also worked on KDA kernel optimization, optimizer research and Tilde Research's MoMoE project. Anthropic researcher Sholto Douglas invited him in the comments to work with teams including Prime and Base10 in San Francisco; Chen confirmed he is heading to the Bay Area but replied "no" when asked whether he was joining Anthropic, leaving his next employer, role and start date unconfirmed.
The move is being read as a marker of US-China competition for top AI talent, and as a test of whether Chinese labs like Moonshot can retain unusually young researchers.