Chinese big tech corporations have begun to secure artificial intelligence (AI) talent. The scale of hiring has surged, and there is a movement to cultivate AI talent internally through expanded internships.
According to the South China Morning Post (SCMP) on the 6th (local time), China’s largest portal, Baidu, stated in a release that job postings have increased by 60% this year during the 'AIDU annual recruitment campaign.' AIDU is a program aimed at attracting and nurturing future AI technology leaders, but the specific scale of hiring was not disclosed.
Baidu plans to recruit across 23 core institutional sectors, including large language model (LLM) algorithms, foundational LLM architecture, machine learning, voice technology, and AI agents. Most of the hiring will focus on positions related to AI. Baidu noted, 'We will train future AI navigators just like we train pilots.'
Other Chinese big tech corporations are also accelerating the recruitment of AI talent. ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, launched the 'Top Seed program' recruitment campaign in March to attract research interns for globally influential projects, while Alibaba has been recruiting AI interns since the beginning of this year.
Recently, Chinese big tech corporations have focused on cultivating AI talent. Tencent Holdings announced that it will hold a competition to build an AI-based recommendation system for digital advertising, one of its main revenue sources, targeting university students, and will extend job offers to the top 10 teams.
The reason Chinese big tech companies are uniformly securing AI talent is that the demand for personnel has surged as the AI business expands. According to the Chinese online recruitment platform Liepin, the AI talent shortage index (TSI) recorded 3.24 as of January. The TSI is calculated based on job postings, response rates, and job-seeking activities, and a value exceeding 1 indicates a talent shortage.
In particular, the TSI index for the search algorithm engineer institutional sector recorded 9.35, while the shortages in the algorithm and voice recognition fields were recorded as 7.35 and 4, respectively. Consequently, job postings for algorithm engineers in China have increased by 44% in the first quarter of this year compared to the previous year, as SCMP reported, citing data from Zhaopin.
The government is also supporting the cultivation of AI talent at the national level. The Chinese government has approved similar programs at 621 higher education institutions by the end of 2024, following the approval of AI undergraduate programs at 35 universities in 2018.