Starting a business at 16 and publishing a paper at 17: When big tech firms begin "talent scouting" from high schools

In March 2026, a technical paper titled *Attention Residuals* published by the Kimi team from Moonshot AI, one of the rising stars in the large model sector, received public praise from Tesla CEO Elon Musk, drawing global attention across the AI industry. Among the 37 listed authors of the paper, the first-named "Guangyu Chen" sparked heated discussions — a 17-year-old high school student from Shenzhen.

In the AI era, Guangyu Chen is far from the only high school student like this. Some have been recruited by leading internet giants with high salaries at a very young age, while others have embarked on entrepreneurial ventures alongside their studies. In an increasingly competitive job market, these AI natives have unexpectedly secured far more opportunities.

What allows them to break through age barriers and seize the initiative? Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi, once famously stated, "Stand at the wind's edge, and even a pig can fly" — a maxim that offers the most straightforward explanation. Standing at the most powerful technological vantage point of the AI wave, widespread anxiety prevails: big companies fear falling behind, investors fear missing out, and professionals fear being replaced.

Yet it is precisely this anxiety that is forcing a redistribution of opportunities. As traditional career paths become overcrowded, the new generation of young people must "take the road less traveled" to bypass the quagmire of standardized competition, and claim their exclusive share of the era's technological dividends amid the gaps of industry growth.

Big Firms Start Talent Recruitment Directly From High School Students

In the AI era, industry wealth is becoming increasingly concentrated, and a fiercer battle for talent has quietly unfolded.

The widespread industry anxiety around AI is obvious: leading companies that successfully launch one breakthrough product can nearly capture all the profits in the sector. Anthropic's growth serves as a microcosm of this trend — with total annual revenue of only $9 billion at the end of 2025, the company saw its ARR skyrocket to $470 billion by May 2026, driven by the explosive popularity of Claude Code among developers following the success of the Claude Opus series.

Behind this runaway profit growth, major tech firms' demand for top-tier talent has become increasingly extreme. According to LatePost, ByteDance's campus recruitment salaries have doubled year after year: its 2024 TopSeed program new grads earned about 1.5 million RMB annually, a figure that rose to 3-5 million RMB in 2025, and core positions in 2026 are even offering 6 million RMB per year with no upper limit.

Now, major companies are even skipping the university stage entirely, setting their sights directly on high school students.

Tencent launched the "Youth Science Training Camp" targeting middle school students aged 13 to 18 worldwide, covering cutting-edge fields such as fintech and AI education. Geely released the "Cross-Era Leap Talent Development Program", which offers direct entry to core positions in new energy and AI for high school graduates with no requirement for college entrance exam scores, with mentorship from three dedicated supervisors, paid training, and an annual salary of up to 300,000 RMB. ByteDance, through its "Top Seed" program, extends consultant offers to outstanding high school students, with interns earning up to 2,000 RMB per day — a highly attractive compensation package.

As reported by LatePost, to accurately identify top students, the Seed program established a dedicated "Student Affairs Department" around 2026, building a comprehensive talent database that collects information on all outstanding current students and recent graduates across the country, and precisely tracks student resumes from key universities, laboratories, and under leading academic supervisors.

A student at a public high school in Shanghai shared on social media that classmates selected into these big company talent programs are all students who could easily achieve high scores in the traditional college entrance exam, generally scoring around 650 points and holding multiple national awards in science innovation and business competitions. This remains a small-scale elite program, as the vast majority of students still follow the traditional path of advancing to higher education via the national college entrance exam.

At the same time, however, some schools that have recognized this era of anxiety early on are starting to provide high school students with more alternative opportunities and employment platforms.

An admissions officer from Beijing's Moon School told Tech Planet that the school has long maintained school-enterprise cooperative training programs with companies including ByteDance, designed to let students learn knowledge through hands-on practice, keep pace with the rapid update of AI-era job requirements, and gain access to the most cutting-edge projects.

Such joint school-enterprise training programs clearly represent a new development path for high school students. A graduate of Moon School told Tech Planet that students can choose to join the joint training program as early as 9th grade, and upon completing three years of the program's curriculum, they can directly secure an internship at ByteDance.

"Many participating students choose to take a full-time job at ByteDance directly afterward, as this path differs significantly from the normal university application route. Completing the school-enterprise curriculum often leaves little time to write application essays or work on admissions projects. Around a dozen of my classmates finished the full program before graduation," the student explained.

A parent of a Moon School student told Tech Planet that not only ByteDance, but also companies like Tencent and Alibaba pay close attention to the project plans developed by the school's students.

From enterprises scrambling for talent to schools collaborating on training, this battle for high school talent has already become an inevitable trend in the AI era.

In the AI Era, High School Students Are Taking "Unconventional Paths"

Young people growing up in the AI era are forging completely different career trajectories.

Apart from joining large corporations, some choose not to work as routine office employees but to start their own businesses, with the vast majority of their ventures centered around AI. On social media platforms, many 16 and 17-year-old teenagers are documenting and sharing their entrepreneurial journeys.

A 16-year-old high school freshman, in his spare time outside classes, started an AI coding business and established a one-person company. He groped his way through product development, launch, strategic pivots, and operational validation through continuous trial and error, sharing his entrepreneurial process on his Xiaohongshu account with the belief that "a degree is not the end point — code can be the starting line."

A 17-year-old Shanghai high school student shared her entrepreneurial experiences and investment insights on Xiaohongshu. She is currently running an AI-focused one-person company and has already secured $500,000 in financing. After studying in Silicon Valley half a year prior, she worked in technical roles at an AI health tech company, learned core entrepreneurial frameworks, and then launched her own venture. Beyond that, she also has a strong passion for investment, describing her daily life in a video as: "Stock trading is my main business, entrepreneurship is my side project, angel investing is my hobby, and attending school is just something I do casually."

To encourage students to pursue AI entrepreneurship, Moon School launched a dedicated program called "One Small Step" in 2025, which guides students to develop entrepreneurial thinking and allocates half of the course time to hands-on practical projects. In addition, there is the "Hackathon" entrepreneurship simulator, where students participate in condensed entrepreneurial simulation competitions — a project that Guangyu Chen, the "super high school student", took part in.

Throughout their four years of high school study, students have long integrated AI into their project creation process. Coupled with cultivated entrepreneurial mindsets, many high school students have embarked on independent entrepreneurial paths. Among Moon School's student cases, some became founders and CEOs of their own companies while still in high school, while others built platforms powered by AI to launch zero-experience startups.

The dynamism of young entrepreneurs is also reshaping the investment community's talent evaluation logic. In the eyes of many investors, projects founded by young people demonstrate far greater imaginative potential than those led by middle-aged entrepreneurs.

To this end, multiple investment institutions have launched dedicated funds exclusively for young founders. The Y Transformer program launched by Yunqi Partners is a typical example: it specifically invests in founders born in 1998 or later, with a total fund size of 100 million RMB, plans to invest in 20-25 early-stage projects, only participates in first-round financing, with a single investment of about $600,000, and a decision-making cycle of just 2-3 weeks. Compared to mature industry experience, investors prioritize these young entrepreneurs' long-term growth potential and future development capabilities.

As the AI-native generation, these high school students have been immersed in an AI-permeated environment since childhood. They face lower barriers to using AI tools and possess a deeper level of understanding, far outpacing adult groups who need to re-adapt to AI systems.

A Moon School graduate told Tech Planet that a major assignment in one of her 2023 courses required using GPT — at that time it was still GPT-3.5 for vibe coding, a concept that had not yet gained widespread discussion, but it immediately sparked strong interest among her classmates. Another current student told Tech Planet that AI is integrated into their daily studies across all subjects, and the school offers a large number of AIGC-focused courses.

An AI instructor at Moon School told Tech Planet that his courses mainly focus on guiding students to develop an initial idea, use AI to assist in iterative derivation, and eventually produce a complete video work, enriching their interests and critical thinking, with a core goal of cultivating their professional thinking patterns.

With no extra cost required to understand the technology, these high school students have long grown accustomed to working alongside AI from the very beginning of their learning journeys.

Technological Iteration Accelerates, No One Can Afford to Wait

The proactive talent recruitment by big companies and the diverse choices made by high school students are reshaping the growth logic for young people. It is not just large corporations that feel anxious — schools, parents, and even students themselves are all worried about being left behind by the advancing AI wave. This collective anxiety is causing the priority of traditional academic advancement paths to be re-evaluated.

The aforementioned parent told Tech Planet that many past graduates of Moon School received at least three or four offers from overseas universities with scholarships, but ultimately chose not to attend. Instead, they went straight to entrepreneurship or joined big tech companies, even AI and biotech startups, planning to continue their education after gaining some work experience. Some graduates even voluntarily stayed at school for an extra year to complete their ongoing projects before applying to better universities.

In such an environment, youth itself has become a rare competitive advantage. With technology evolving at a dizzying pace, no one dares to delay. For many people, spending extra years in school is seen as "wasting time", while seizing the opportunity to start a business in the current boom, capturing market share, and realizing rapid value growth is regarded as a more pragmatic choice.

This mindset is not unique to the AI era. Every major technological wave, whether for internet companies, ordinary schools, parents, or students, is a race against time. People are doing everything possible to keep up with the rhythm of the times, because once the window of opportunity closes, capital shifts direction and opportunities narrow, making it far more difficult to enter the market afterward.

Looking back at the PC era, Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard after only three semesters to found Microsoft at the age of 20. He explicitly stated that if he had waited to finish his degree before starting his business, he would have likely missed the golden window of opportunity for personal computer development — getting in early was the biggest advantage.

In the mobile internet era, Wang Xing gave up his studies in the United States to return to China and found Meituan, followed by a large number of post-90s college students who plunged into entrepreneurship before completing their degrees.

Today, the participants in this "head start" competition are becoming younger and younger. The focus of talent competition has shifted from college students to high school students, with many even participating in cutting-edge research and taking internships at big firms at an even earlier age. Whether it is big companies locking in high school talents in advance or young people actively flocking to the industry boom, the underlying consensus is clear: as the pace of technological iteration continues to accelerate, in the AI wave, no one can afford to wait any longer.

This article is from WeChat Official Account "Tech Planet" (ID: tech618), written by Zhang Nongyi, and published with authorization from 36Kr.