What is Discovery Loop, Chinese teen AI prodigy Nathan Chen’s rumoured next destination?

Just days after announcing his departure from Moonshot AI, teen Chinese artificial intelligence prodigy Nathan Chen Guangyu seems to have found his next destination.
On Tuesday, Arfur Grok, a widely-watched anonymous social media account that tracks AI talent movements in the US, posted that the former Moonshot AI researcher was joining Discovery Loop, an AI start-up founded by four former Google senior researchers including former chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Launched just two months ago, the start-up has quickly attracted industry attention due to its star-studded founding team as well as its ambitious mission: to automate scientific research with AI.
Discovery Loop has already recruited several star researchers from US big tech giants, including other former Google engineers. But at just 17 years old, Chen is likely to be one of its youngest members.
Chen did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. Discovery Loop said it does not comment on personnel matters.
One of China’s most promising young AI talents, Chen’s announcement last week that he was leaving China for the US sparked widespread speculation about his next destination.
Despite a stint at Moonshot that lasted less than a year, Chen helped pioneer technical breakthroughs that delivered cost-efficiency gains for its flagship Kimi models, making them competitive with US heavyweights such as OpenAI’s GPT and Anthropic’s Claude.
Moonshot has emerged as one of China’s strongest AI model labs, with its K3 model gaining global traction due to its powerful capabilities and open-weight nature.

In a social media post after Chen’s announcement, Moonshot senior researcher Du Yulun wrote that he and Chen had “several long conversations about his decision” to leave, but it was ultimately “best for [Chen] to explore and follow his new curiosity as much as possible at his age”.
Though Discovery Loop has yet to release any products, it is already seeking a valuation of around US$50 billion in another funding round, Business Insider reported last month.
Its initial funding round was led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with Google parent Alphabet also an investor.
In one of his first public appearances after leaving Google, Dean said at the Agentic AI Summit at the University of California, Berkeley, in early August that his start-up’s work would be similar to efforts to achieve recursive self-improvement (RSI) – the stated goal of leading AI companies in both the US and China.
Just as RSI looks to automate AI development through AI itself, Dean explained that AI could one day autonomously run thousands of scientific experiments in parallel and use the results to identify the best experiments to do next, thereby shortening the scientific process from years to hours or even minutes.
“By building models that are really good at understanding many, many different domains of science and engineering, you can get PhD-level expertise in a model across many different domains,” he said.