Opportunities of the times.
Author: Wang Lu
一位高Zhongsheng has dominated the AI circle.
The reason was that 17-year-old Chen Guangyu posted a message saying goodbye to Kimi. In a few words, there was no explanation of the reason for leaving, nor was the next stop announced. Speculations immediately began to swirl about where he would go.
The last time Chen Guangyu attracted attention was in March this year. At that time, he was still in his senior year of high school and participated in the paper “Attention Residuals” as the co-first author. The paper was forwarded by Musk, and the related technology was later applied to Kimi K3, making this young man from Shenzhen famous.
At almost the same time, Deedy Das, a well-known investor in Silicon Valley, talked about an unnamed 17-year-old boy who had 5 job offers, all worth more than 1 million US dollars (approximately 7 million yuan). The coincidence of age and experience quickly made the outside world think of Chen Guangyu.
17 years old, 5 offers, 1 million US dollars – enough for people to see the magic of this era.
01
17-year-old boy quits job
It was revealed that he had a million-dollar offer
Chen Guangyu left Kimi.
On October 15, the 17-year-old Shenzhen boy posted a farewell message on social platforms, saying that the past year was his best time so far. Looking back on this experience, he said, “Thank you for everything, especially Du Yulun who believed in and hired a 16-year-old me.”
When he joined the company, Chen Guangyu was still a senior in high school. In March this year, his name appeared on the list of co-first authors of the paper “Attention Residuals” together with Zhang Yu and Su Jianlin. Musk later forwarded the paper, calling it “impressive” and drawing attention to the young intern on Kimi’s team.
By July this year, Attention Residuals had been used in Kimi K3 and became one of the underlying technologies used in this 2.8 trillion parameter model. Chen Guangyu also participated in the preparations for the release of K3. In his farewell post, he still remembered the days when he and his colleagues were working and watching the World Cup.
Regarding the decision to leave, Du Yulun revealed that the two had had several long talks. Although he is reluctant to give up, he still hopes that Chen Guangyu will explore as much as possible at this age and follow new curiosities.
Chen Guangyu did not explain the next step in his farewell letter, but only wrote at the end: “There are more things worth exploring.”
In the comment area, new invitations followed.
Sholto Douglas, head of scalable reinforcement learning from Anthropic, mentioned that he had just met Chen Guangyu last week, and then asked half-jokingly: “Are the plans still at Carnegie Mellon University? Do you want to come to San Francisco to work together?”
“Thank you Sholto! I’m going to the Bay Area.” Chen Guangyu replied. Some people speculated that he would join Anthropic, but he quickly responded with a brief “no :)”.
Just a few days before this farewell letter was sent, news of a million-dollar annual salary offer had already put a 17-year-old boy in the spotlight.
Last week, Menlo Ventures investor Deedy Das shared a meeting experience. He met a teenager who was not proficient in English when he was 14 years old, so he began to learn AI by himself with the help of large models. After that, the other party interned at a top AI company for a year, traveled halfway around the world, and entered a top ten university in the United States to study for his undergraduate degree. Two weeks after enrolling, he chose to drop out.
According to Deedy, the boy was 17 years old at the time and already had five job offers from top cutting-edge AI laboratories in San Francisco, all worth more than $1 million.
17 years old, one-year internship, one million US dollars… several pieces of information were stacked together, which quickly attracted questions, and some people connected this experience with Chen Guangyu.
However, Deedy did not disclose the boy’s name. When pressed, Deedy relayed the boy’s reason for wanting to go to San Francisco: the people there are great and they are doing what he wants to do.
“I just want to study and don’t care about money at all.”
02
The most popular high school student from Shenzhen
Chen Guangyu’s story begins in Shenzhen.
Born in 2009, he grew up in Shenzhen. He studied at Shenzhen Nanshan School, the former High School Affiliated to Peking University, and China Resources Trail Bay Bayside International School. He just graduated from high school this year.
Like most post-00s generation, he is full of curiosity about the world. In middle school, I tried to register a Shopify store as a parent, organized a youth open source community, made a Crypto robot, and even fantasized about becoming a professional skier.
When preparing to apply for college, Chen Guangyu suspended activities that he did not like in preparation for further studies, opened an AI safety book that he had wanted to read for a long time, and then read about physics, the universe, and Steve Jobs. Later, he recalled in his blog that during those weeks, he studied just to satisfy his curiosity and did not need to prove anything to others. But seeing his classmates busy preparing application materials makes him anxious, worried that what he is doing is meaningless.
The turning point came in February last year, when Chen Guangyu participated in a hackathon for middle school students and brought a project called ThirdArm – an idea about “a third mechanical auxiliary hand for humans”. It was also because of this project that he met Dong Keyan, a former founding team member of YC China and Qiji Chuangtan. The latter gave him a far-reaching suggestion: focus on more cutting-edge technologies.
Since then, Chen Guangyu began to use AI to study papers, track GitHub open source projects, and gradually build up his understanding of machine learning. In his opinion, the step-by-step method of getting started by following the video courses from ten years ago is already too slow. “In this era, AI is the best teacher.”
Soon, a technical blog brought him a job opportunity. At that time, Chen Guangyu shared his research experience on DeltaNet. At that time, his social account only had 20 fans, but the article attracted a reply from Yang Songlin, a researcher in the field. Later, he was seen by the CEO of Tilde Research, a Silicon Valley AI startup, and took the initiative to invite a call.
Two months later, 16-year-old Chen Guangyu received an offer from the company and flew to Palo Alto, California alone to start a seven-week internship.
This experience had an impact on him beyond just “entering an overseas company” itself. Dong Keyan once reminded him not to think of himself as an intern, but as a CEO: If this was your company, what would you do? This sentence later became his working method. Since then, his involvement has gradually expanded from technical issues to more complex issues, including operational setup, financing rhythm, investor communication, and long-term strategic thinking.
The subsequent story is already familiar to everyone. Chen Guangyu joined Kimi to continue studying model architecture. Less than a year later, he decided to leave again to see new possibilities.
At 17 years old, many choices will never become a foregone conclusion. As Chen Guangyu wrote on the homepage of his personal website: “Explore the possibilities of intelligence.” As for where this road will lead, he is still moving forward.
03
搶人，搶before graduation
The wealth story of AI is written on the salary slips of young people.
The salary offered by major domestic Internet companies to fresh graduates has been rumored to be as high as 8 million yuan. A professor from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University once revealed that PhD graduates in the group’s large-scale model field can earn an annual salary of more than 6 million yuan, and master’s degree graduates can earn more than a million yuan. The eagerness to grab people even extended to the graduation defense scene: HR from a large company came with flowers to celebrate the students who had been hired.
Open Anthropic’s official website and you can also find a public reference: research positions in the direction of pre-training, the listed annual salary range is US$350,000 to US$850,000, and the specific salary is related to the level of the position. These works directly address model architecture and large-scale training.
As for the young people who have already emerged, the quotations are even more staggering. Zuckerberg personally called to recruit Matt Deitke, a 24-year-old AI researcher at the time. In order to invite him to join, Meta gave a final salary package of approximately US$250 million over four years, of which up to US$100 million may be paid in the first year.
The founder of a technology giant personally extended an invitation to young people in their twenties. The eagerness for talent competition is evident.
Extreme quotes only belong to a few people, but the logic of competition is not difficult to understand: models are rapidly iterated, technical routes still have variables, and the addition of key researchers may bring new directions.
The time to grab people is also before graduation. When Tencent launched the recruitment of Qingyun interns this year, it particularly encouraged junior students to submit applications, proposed that there would be no upper limit on salary, and provided additional incentives for outstanding contributors. Core businesses such as Hunyuan, Yuanbao, and WeChat are open to interns, and outstanding candidates will have the opportunity to lead projects and work directly with technical leaders.
ByteDance Seed has written the research results of young people on its recruitment page: some people have participated in the research and development of the Seedance 2.0 pre-training architecture less than a year after graduation; some are still interning, and their results have been used in Doubao online services and model post-training. Outstanding interns who meet the requirements will also have the opportunity to obtain “bean bag shares”.
If you wait until graduation, it may already be too late.
Every generation has its own fate. An annual salary of nearly 10 million yuan can change a person’s life. Put into the R&D investment of AI companies, it is an early bet on the next breakthrough. The outcome is undecided, missing out on key talent, and potentially more expensive.
No one knows how long this round of high wages will last. When people talk about the opportunities of the times, they often think of entrepreneurship, financing and listing. But for the young people in front of them, the opportunity has become concrete as an offer.
Related Reading
- Five million Chinese doctors are being competed for by major Internet companies2026-10-25
- I went to the Yushu Conference and Wang Xingxing made an explosive speech.2026-10-24
- Is it possible for the entire population to “quit” red fruits?2026-10-24
- Liang Wenfeng reveals the secret to making money2026-10-24
- Musk opens the door to a SpaceX-Tesla merger as shareholders weigh a deal2026-10-21
