17-Year-Old Researcher Chen Guangyu Leaves Moonshot AI's Kimi Team

On October 15, 17-year-old Chen Guangyu announced on X that he had recently left Moonshot AI's Kimi team. He did not disclose the reason for his departure or his next move, only thanking his colleagues and the team that hired a 16-year-old, calling the past year the best time of his life.

Chen, born in 2009, joined Kimi as an intern in November 2025 to work on model architecture research. He co-authored the Attention Residuals (AttnRes) paper with Zhang Yu and Su Jianlin, and the technique has been incorporated into the architecture of Kimi K3, the first open-weight 3T-parameter model released by Moonshot AI in July 2026.

The departure drew attention from the AI community. Anthropic's core researcher Sholto Douglas congratulated him in the comments, asking whether his plan to attend Carnegie Mellon University remained unchanged and inviting him to San Francisco to work with teams like Prime and Base10. Chen replied that he was heading to the Bay Area. Kimi researcher Yulun Du said that although he felt sad and heartbroken to see him go, exploring new curiosities at such a young age might be the best choice for him.

Prior to joining Kimi, Chen interned at Tilde Research in Silicon Valley, working on the memory-optimized mixture-of-experts model MoMoE. He ended his farewell post with: "There are still more things worth exploring."