Former Kimi researcher Chen Guangyu joins Google cofounder Jeff Dean's AI startup Discovery Loop

On October 20, anonymous account Arfur Grok reported that Chen Guangyu, former core developer of the Kimi model and former 17-year-old prodigy, had joined Discovery Loop, the AI startup founded by Google former chief scientist Jeff Dean. Discovery Loop, established in August this year, gathered four top AI scientists from Google and is seeking a 50 billion USD valuation in funding, though Chen's onboarding remains unconfirmed by him or the company. Earlier, on October 15, Chen announced his departure from Moonshot AI, stating he had more things to explore. Five days prior, Anthropic's Sholto Douglas congratulated him in a comment, but Chen replied "No :)" when directly asked if he was joining Anthropic.

Discovery Loop's team includes Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, who previously worked on Gemini. The startup aims to use AI to automate scientific research and engineering experiments, running thousands of experiment loops to accelerate breakthroughs in machine learning, chip design, biology and drug discovery. Although the company has not launched a public product, it has received investment from Alphabet, Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures. Market chatter indicates the company raised its target valuation from approximately 10 billion USD in August to 50 billion USD by September 11. Chen, who turned 17 this year, began self-studying AI via large models at age 14, completed a solo internship in Silicon Valley at 16, and contributed to Kimi's architecture research after joining in November 2024. He co-authored the paper "Attention Residuals" in March this year, proposing cross-layer attention mechanisms to improve Transformer residual connections.