Gen Z AI prodigy, Made in Guangdong
Just in the past March, the AI circle was flooded with news about a group of post - 2000s.
When Elon Musk typed "Impressive" on his social platform, the global AI circle first focused its attention on a 17 - year - old high school student from Shenzhen, Chen Guangyu.
Among the 37 co - authors, Chen Guangyu, as an intern of the Dark Side of the Moon Kimi team, became the co - first author of the paper "Attention Residuals". Alongside him is Su Jianlin, a well - known figure in the large - model circle and the proposer of the RoPE position encoding.
After the paper went viral, Su Jianlin mentioned in his blog post "Memoirs of Attention Residuals" that Chen Guangyu and another author, Zhang Yu, jointly proposed the "Block (XYZ) AttnRes" (blocked attention residual) design in the paper. This design not only increased the training efficiency by 25% but also significantly reduced the cost.
After the paper became a huge hit, the outside world quickly turned its attention to this 17 - year - old genius.
But in fact, just two days before the Dark Side of the Moon released its report, a financing news also excited the venture capital circle. Axiom, an AI company founded by 25 - year - old Hong Letong, just completed a $200 million Series A financing, with a post - investment valuation of up to $1.6 billion (about 11 billion RMB). At this time, it had only been a little over a year since the company was founded, and its valuation had increased by more than 5 times.
Even earlier, on March 10th, Lingchu Intelligence, a company that had been established for just over a year, announced the completion of a total of 2 billion RMB in angel and Pre - A rounds of financing. Its co - founder, Chen Yuanpei, was born in 2001. He once studied at Peking University and Stanford University and was a student of Fei - Fei Li.
Interestingly, these post - 2000s AI newcomers are all from Guangdong. If it's just a coincidence, then the increasing number of post - 2000s choosing to start AI businesses in Guangdong is another traceable trend.
Xie Weiduo, an OPC geek born in 2002, set up his company in Shenzhen. In just half a year, he made his AI voice large model rank first globally and had more than one million registered users and a group of paying users. Just a few days ago, he revealed in a media interview that the angel - round valuation of his company reached 200 million RMB.
Min Yuheng, born in 2000, incubated Zero - Power Robotics in the Tsinghua AI & Robot Laboratory and then set the company's headquarters in Nanshan, Shenzhen. In just half a year, it completed three rounds of financing, with a total amount exceeding 100 million RMB.
Zhang Yunuo, also born in 2000, dropped out of Cornell University. Instead of choosing Silicon Valley or staying in New York, he went straight to Nanshan, Shenzhen. His company, Skyris, created the world's first flying AI companion hardware and received investment from Xiaohongshu.
While a group of AI investors are still hunting everywhere, competing for "early - stage and small - scale" investment targets, a group of young people born after the millennium are starting from Guangdong and refreshing the map of the AI field at an amazing speed.
A
If we simply define these young people as "genius teenagers", it's a bit one - sided. Looking beyond the halo, we'll find that they all have a common growth path - they were all tempered through various high - intensity "competitions", and most of them are self - taught and switched to this field halfway.
Like most post - 2000s, Chen Guangyu is full of curiosity about the world. In middle school, he registered a Shopify store as a parent to do e - commerce, organized a youth open - source community, developed a Crypto robot, and even once dreamed of becoming a professional ski athlete.
He also participated in the Platinum Group of the USACO (USA Computing Olympiad) - an arena for the world's top high - school programmers. At this time, Chen Guangyu was already a programming expert.
The turning point came in February 2025, at a high - school hackathon in Beijing. He stood on the demonstration stage with the concept of "ThirdArm", a mechanical auxiliary hand for humans.
It was at this competition that he met Dong Kehan, a member of the founding team of former YC China and MiraclePlus. He was selected for the global high - potential future leaders program for 15 - 17 - year - olds initiated by Dong, who advised him to focus on more cutting - edge technologies.
Chen Guangyu took the advice and used AI to assist in extensively studying classic papers and tracking open - source projects on GitHub.
Soon, his technical sharing on the social platform caught the attention of the CEO of a Silicon Valley AI startup, and he received a job offer from the company.
In the summer of 2025, he took a flight to Silicon Valley and interned for 7 weeks at a startup deeply associated with OpenAI and Anthropic.
After returning to China, Chen Guangyu joined the Dark Side of the Moon Kimi team in November 2025. Inside Kimi, he won the championship of the 48 - hour "hackathon", which helped him stand out among the interns and enter the core circle of the Dark Side of the Moon research team.
Competitions are not only a stepping - stone for Chen Guangyu but also a coming - of - age ceremony for Hong Letong.
Growing up in an ordinary migrant - worker family in Tianhe District, Guangzhou, she showed her mathematical talent at an early age. She was one of the only four girls in the Guangdong selection area of the National High - School Mathematics Olympiad. At the age of 14, she wrote the three letters "MIT" on the edge of her draft paper to motivate herself.
In 2018, 17 - year - old Hong Letong was admitted to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She completed a double major in mathematics and physics in three years, published 9 academic papers, won the highest honor for female mathematicians in the United States - the Alice T. Schafer Mathematics Prize, and became one of the only four Rhodes Scholars from China in 2021, going to the University of Oxford to continue her studies in neuroscience.
During this period, she conducted deep - learning research as the first author at the Gatsby Computational Neuroscience Unit of University College London, officially stepping into the AI field. Later, she started a dual - discipline doctoral program in mathematics and law at Stanford University.
Just when everyone thought she would climb up the academic pyramid, in 2025, she chose to drop out of Stanford and founded Axiom, a company that tries to make AI "reliable" through mathematical proofs.
In the late autumn of 2024, in a coffee shop near Stanford, Hong Letong had a several - hour conversation with Shubho Sengupta, the then director of Meta AI research. The core topic was only one: Can AI really learn mathematical reasoning?
It was this conversation that changed her life path. She targeted the fatal flaw in the AI industry: although the model's capabilities are getting stronger, the reliability problem remains unresolved. She proposed the concept of "Verified AI" and developed a system that allows every step of AI reasoning to be mathematically verified, rather than relying on probability to guess the answers.
In December 2025, in the Putnam Competition, known as the "Undergraduate Mathematics Olympiad", the Axiom system answered all 12 questions correctly. It should be noted that in the nearly 100 - year history, only 5 human contestants have achieved this.
Another cross - field talent is Chen Peiyuan, a post - 2000s from Guangdong. Although he majored in civil engineering at South China University of Technology, he taught himself robot algorithms at the back of the classroom every day. With the resume of being the national champion of RoboMaster, he made his way into Yang Yaodong's team at Peking University and then became a visiting scholar of Fei - Fei Li, the "godmother of AI" at Stanford.
At Stanford, he proposed the Psi - CO model, which for the first time in the world realized the simultaneous control of two arms and two hands for multi - skill operations in the real world using reinforcement learning. This achievement got him on the 2025 Forbes "30 Under 30 Asia" list.
In 2024, he was offered a position as a "Genius Teenager" by Huawei, but he declined and instead co - founded Lingchu Intelligence with Wang Qibin, a veteran with 20 years of industry experience.
Just last month, Lingchu Intelligence announced the completion of a total of about 2 billion RMB in angel and Pre - A rounds of financing, and its valuation soared by 7 times in a year.
Competitions tempered their technical edge, and self - learning gave them the courage to break boundaries. When talent meets the trend of the times, these post - 2000s from Guangdong quickly grew from technical newcomers to a new force stirring up the AI venture capital circle.
B
While local talents are emerging in Guangdong, another group of post - 2000s geeks from all over the country are like migratory birds sensing the warmth and accurately landing on the banks of the Pearl River.
Xie Weiduo didn't initially plan to start a business. A few years ago, when he was looking for a perfect voice for his self - made AI virtual anchor "Muji Meng", he searched all the available solutions on the market and finally had to do it himself.
This decision to "do it himself" eventually led to the establishment of Guangzhou Shuogu Technology and the "Wusheng VOCU" large model, which dominated the HuggingFace global speech synthesis list for more than three months, outperforming international unicorns like ElevenLabs.
The "cradle" of this company is the Pazhou Mofang Large - Model Entrepreneurship Base in Guangzhou. There is a saying here that "you just need to bring your brain". Entrepreneurs don't need to bring capital and resources; they just need to bring a smart mind and an intuition for technology.
"The venue is completely rent - free. They gave us an independent office and provided a lot of free resources in terms of computing power and data, which helped us save a lot of upfront costs," Xie Weiduo explained the reason for choosing to start a business in Guangzhou.
Guangdong provides not only a "cost - saving" environment but also a stage to be seen.
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. In just half a year, they completed three rounds of financing and became a phenomenon - level project in the venture capital circle.
They also set their company's headquarters in Nanshan, Shenzhen. The relaxed and friendly financing environment has become the gravitational force attracting these migratory geeks to the south.
"The post - 2000s have arrived." At the event site of the "X - Day" Xili Lake Roadshow Club, when Li Yizhe introduced the team members, the investors below couldn't help but sigh. The "Xili Lake Roadshow Club" is a regular technology investment and financing docking platform built by Nanshan District, Shenzhen.
Another 24 - year - old young man, Zhang Yunuo, made the same choice.
In 2025, Zhang Yunuo dropped out of Cornell University. Instead of going to Silicon Valley or staying in New York, he flew directly to Nanshan, Shenzhen and founded Skyris, focusing on companion robots. The bionic flying robot named BOOBOO is also the world's first flying AI companion hardware. This product, which sounds a bit "toy - like", received investment from Xiaohongshu and Houxue Capital.
"In China, for AI robots and consumer - level large models, Shenzhen has the highest efficiency in terms of supply chain, talent, and capital. There is no other city more suitable," Zhang Yunuo explained his choice in an interview.
Local talents are emerging one after another, and outside geeks are flocking in. These two young forces, one local and one from outside, are converging in Guangdong, jointly outlining the most vibrant young map of the Chinese AI field.
C
The emergence of geniuses cannot be separated from a suitable soil.
If you spread out a map, you'll find an interesting phenomenon: DJI started from a small warehouse of less than 20 square meters in Chegongmiao, Shenzhen, and finally became the synonym for the "Drone Capital"; Alibaba was born in an apartment in Hangzhou's Hubin Garden and finally became a pole of the digital economy; Wuhan, with its traditional automobile industry foundation, quietly took the lead in the second half of the intelligent connected vehicle era.
If we look back at the time axis, the rule of "geography influencing industry" was already set in the mobile - Internet era.
In 2006, Wang Tao was just a graduate student at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. Under the guidance of his tutor, Li Zexiang, he began to study the drone flight control system. That year, with 200,000 RMB funded by his parents, he rented a warehouse of less than 20 square meters in Chegongmiao, Shenzhen and founded DJI with two classmates.
At that time, Shenzhen already had the most complete electronic industry chain in the country - from the component market in Huaqiangbei to the OEM factories outside the urban area. It only took a few days here to turn an idea from a drawing to a prototype. This "Shenzhen speed" made DJI's drone R & D thrive. More than a decade later, DJI occupies more than 80% of the global civilian drone market.
This rule of "geography influencing industry" also applies in today's AI circle. Why is it specifically Guangdong that can nurture and attract so many post - 2000s AI geniuses?
The precipitation of the supply chain is important, but perhaps more important than hardware is allowing different species to coexist, allowing "super individuals" to grow wildly, and building "infrastructure" for this growth.
At the end of last year, Haizhu District, Guangzhou, clearly proposed to cultivate "super individuals". Recently, it will release ten measures for the innovative development of OPC, covering the entire chain from space incubation, computing - power subsidies, algorithm filing, scenario opening to financial support. Among them, the workstation fee is fully waived for up to 12 months, 50% of the computing - power purchase cost is subsidized, and the leading scenario projects can receive a maximum support of 5 million RMB.
These policies are refined to the "daily token consumption", which obviously shows a better understanding of the rhythm of AI entrepreneurs.
In addition, the whole province of Guangdong implements the policy of issuing "computing - power vouchers", "training - power vouchers", and "model vouchers" simultaneously, targeting the core pain points of high computing - power costs and the scarcity of high - quality models in AI startups. At the same time, it holds various artificial - intelligence innovation and entrepreneurship competitions such as the "Mass Innovation Cup" and sets up special tracks to provide a stage for young talents to show their talents and connect with resources.
It's not hard to see that the phenomenon of Guangdong producing a large number of post - 2000s AI geniuses is no longer an amazing coincidence but an inevitable result of the mature operation of an innovation ecosystem.
These post - 2000s are starting from here to reshape the future map of AI.