A post-2000 person from Shenzhen unexpectedly became popular.

The post-2000s generation is making its debut.

Recently, the name of a post-2000s individual has become a sensation in the AI circle: Chen Guangyu, a high school student from Shenzhen. What catapulted him into the public eye was a paper from the Dark Side of the Moon Kimi team, which was reposted and praised by Elon Musk, the head of Tesla.

One of the first authors of this paper is none other than Chen Guangyu.

This is not an isolated case. Just as at the one-year special event of the "X-Day" Xili Lake Roadshow Club's "AI for X" in early March, we witnessed a group of post-2000s entrepreneurs taking the stage. This scene has made people start to re - understand why this wave of innovation is being led by such a group of young people.

Elon Musk Praises Kimi

A 17-Year-Old High School Student Solves an AI Problem

Born in 2009, Chen Guangyu is from Shenzhen and is currently studying in a high school in the BASIS system.

Like most post-2000s, he is full of curiosity about the world. In middle school, he once tried to register a Shopify store using his parents' identity. He also organized a youth open - source community, developed a Crypto robot, and even fantasized about becoming a professional ski athlete.

The turning point came last February when Chen Guangyu participated in a high school hackathon with a project called ThirdArm - an idea about a "third mechanical auxiliary hand for humans". It was also through this project that he met Dong Kehan, a member of the founding team of former YC China and Miracle Plus. The latter gave him a far - reaching suggestion: focus on more cutting - edge technologies.

After that, Chen Guangyu began to use AI to study papers and track open - source projects on GitHub, gradually building his understanding of machine learning. In his view, the method of following video courses from a decade ago to get started step by step is too slow. "In this era, AI is the best teacher."

Soon, his technical sharing on social platforms caught the attention of the CEO of a Silicon Valley AI startup, and he received a job offer from the company.

During the summer vacation, he went to Silicon Valley for an internship. This experience had an impact on him beyond just "joining an overseas company".

Dong Kehan once reminded him not to think of himself as an intern but as a CEO: If this were your company, what would you do? This sentence later became his working method. After that, the content he was involved in gradually extended from technical issues to more complex topics, including operation setup, financing rhythm, communication with investors, and long - term strategic thinking.

After returning to China, Chen Guangyu joined the Dark Side of the Moon Kimi in November last year. It wasn't until this year that a paper made his name more widely known.

Just last week, the Kimi team published a paper titled "Attention Residuals". It was then reposted by Elon Musk, who said the work was "impressive". The first authors of this paper are Chen Guangyu, Zhang Yu, and Su Jianlin.

The reason this paper has attracted attention is that it attempts to rewrite a core design that large models have used for many years since the Transformer architecture was proposed in 2017: residual connection.

Su Jianlin once recalled that the team initially came up with a relatively simple version, and the experimental results were significantly better than traditional residual connections. Then, Chen Guangyu and Zhang Yu joined, continued to conduct verification on a larger - scale model, and proposed one of the key designs in the paper: Block AttnRes (Block Attention Residual). While retaining the effect of "attention residuals" as much as possible, they reduced the additional cost.

Recently, Kimi officially revealed that this method enables large models to learn "selective memory" and can improve model training efficiency by 25%.

After the paper became a hit, the outside world quickly focused on this young man. However, compared with the outside hype, Chen Guangyu's reaction was quite restrained.

He has repeatedly emphasized that the credit should go to the team. Just as he sighed on his social platform that this work might change the history of large language models and then left the words: "After the sigh, back to business."

The "X" Explosion

Post-2000s Entrepreneurs from Shenzhen Take the Stage

Chen Guangyu is not an isolated case. More and more post-2000s entrepreneurs are stepping into the spotlight from Shenzhen.

Min Yuheng, Cheng Yi, and Li Yizhe are students at the Shenzhen International Graduate School of Tsinghua University. They founded Zero - Power Robotics in January last year. They completed three rounds of financing in just half a year, becoming a phenomenon - level project in the venture capital circle. I still remember at the "X - Day" Xili Lake Roadshow Club event, when Li Yizhe introduced the team members, the investors in the audience couldn't help but sigh:

"The post-2000s generation is making its debut."

Coincidentally, 24 - year - old Zhang Yunuo dropped out of Cornell University and founded the companion robot company Skyris in Nanshan District, Shenzhen, and received investment from Xiaohongshu. One young face after another has emerged, outlining a clearer image of the new generation of entrepreneurs in Shenzhen.

Different from the previous generation of entrepreneurs, the entrepreneurial logic of these "post - 2000s" in Shenzhen is lighter, faster, and more globally - oriented. They are no longer obsessed with the halo of "big - company resumes", but rather value the number of stars on GitHub, the citation of papers, and whether the technology can truly change the world. They don't wait for standard answers but are used to defining problems from scratch.

This is the fresh blood in Shenzhen's entrepreneurial team. As is well - known, Shenzhen has a globally leading hardware supply chain and efficient algorithm implementation scenarios; there is an agglomeration of universities, research institutions, and innovation platforms, as well as a rapid response from capital, industry, and the market. Turning an idea from code into a prototype in Shenzhen may only take "half an hour". This half - hour represents the logistics distance from Nanshan Zhiyuan to Huaqiangbei and the conversion efficiency from a laboratory paper to a startup's demo.

More importantly, Shenzhen always provides an innovative soil for young people to make continuous mistakes, quickly verify, and keep growing.

The roots of innovation are often deeply embedded in talent and education. In 2021, Professor Li Zexiang, known as the "father of DJI", chose to establish the Shenzhen Institute of Technology and Innovation in the Xili Lake International Science and Education City. It does not confer traditional degrees but focuses on bridging the "last mile" from the laboratory to the market. At the same time, research institutes of universities such as Tsinghua University, Peking University, and Harbin Institute of Technology have also gathered here, making Nanshan gradually become a "university town without walls", where knowledge, technology, and industrial needs collide frequently.

If Xili Lake is nurturing a group of "AI - native" young entrepreneurs today, what it bears is not only an innovation space but also a spirit of continuous exploration. This spirit can be precisely summarized by the letter "X".

"X" represents Xili Lake and is constantly evolving with richer connotations, symbolizing the unknown, exploration, infinite possibilities, and the extreme, which is highly consistent with the essence of investment and innovation. At the same time, the X - Day Xili Lake Roadshow Club, the X9 Alliance, the X - Lake Forum, the X - accelerate Angel Co - creation Club, the InnoX Institute of Technology and Innovation, and the X - Institute Zero - One College together form the Nanshan Science and Technology Innovation "X" brand promotion matrix.

As more and more "post - 2000s" step onto the stage, what people see is not only the collective debut of the new generation of entrepreneurs but also a city embracing the next wave of innovation with a more open attitude.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Investment World AI", author: Wang Lu, published by 36Kr with authorization.