The market is eager to seek AI talent to the extent that it’s on demand.
Late L atepost had documented this detail in a report When an investor followed the names on the AI papers one by one, he found that they had all previously met with Zhang Yiming individually, including PhD students who had not yet graduated.
It’s a signal that means the Internet majors are using their maximum energy to tap into talent in the AI field.
Not only the top elites, for any industry in a period of rapid explosion, the basic positions of employees to support the landing of the business will also become the focus of competition.In mid-February, Alibaba’s AI To C business opened a large-scale recruitment, with hundreds of open positions Almost at the same time, Tencent’s AI assistant, Tencent Yuanbao, opened a hot recruitment.
Tencent Yuanbao opened hot recruitment Photo source Tencent Recruitment
When the scorching, fierce and cruel AI race takes place, the opportunity for individuals appears The first recruiting goodwill held out by the major companies is the salary.
At the beginning of this year’s Lunar New Year, super unicorn DeepSeek had sparked a lot of attention for its high salary recruitment.
According to the recruitment information released by DeepSeek’s parent company, Phantom Square Quantitative, all the recruitment positions have an annual salary of at least about 500,000 yuan, and some of the positions, such as deep learning researcher, have a maximum annual salary of more than 1.76 million. Even AGI interns, whose salary is 500 yuan a day 1000 yuan a day, can earn tens of thousands of dollars a month.
DeepSeek released job postings, and the highest annual salary for some positions, such as deep learning researcher, is more than $1.76 million.
Looking at the entire AI industry, high salary is still a common phenomenon. According to the big data of hunting and hiring, in the past year, in the AI technology hot recruiting TOP5 positions, there are nearly one third 30 97 of the positions with an annual salary of more than 500,000 yuan.
In the past, the prosperity of the traditional Internet industry gave birth to a group of urban middle class represented by programmers, and now, AI is also giving birth to such a feast.
A salary increase of 30 is not a problem
Zhuang Cheng, who works as a programmer in a large Internet factory, is recently considering jumping ship, and he is looking for AI-related opportunities.
The reasons are multiple.
On the one hand, the prospect of traditional programmers worries him. AI development is so fast that it makes me dizzy, afraid of being replaced by AI , Zhuang Cheng said to us. A year ago, the department leader approached him and said that the future introduction of AI technology may lead to layoffs, and the first thing that will be done is to retain programmers who are more adept at using AI.
Zhuang Cheng studied artificial intelligence in graduate school, just four or five years ago when he first graduated, artificial intelligence is not considered a broad path, the counterpart of the job is not easy to find. He remembers that there was a doctoral student in the lab who went to Huawei after graduation and got a million dollars a year, but that was a handful of top AI professionals, and he, like many others, went into an Internet company and became a programmer.
In a few short years, the situation has reversed. Junior programmers began to feel the threat from AI and desperately wanted to swim to the AI pool.
Compared with other people, IT practitioners on the rise of AI feelings more intuitive complex, they have to change themselves, fully embrace AI. Zhuang Cheng flirted with, skilled in the use of a variety of AI software will become the most common sentence on people’s resumes in the future.
Another reason why Zhuang Cheng wants to jump ship is salary.
Although affected by the work years Interview performance and other factors, but if you can successfully turn to AI-related positions, a salary increase of 30 not a problem, and this is now the average large factory programmers to jump after the upper limit of salary increases.
The salary increase of AI positions in the past few years is significantly higher than that of other computer-related industries. Shenzhen AI company super parameter technology CTO Zhang Zhengsheng told us so.
AI talent salaries are rising, partly as a result of market-based competition.
IT practitioners have more intuitive feelings about the rise of AI Complex.
In 2012, before the public noticed the change in the tide, the battle for top AI talent had already begun.
That year, the father of AI, 2024 Nobel Prize in Physics winner Jeff Hinton, along with two of his students, published a groundbreaking paper. Big companies quickly realized the value in it and wanted to become employers of Hinton’s team.
Google, Baidu, Microsoft, and DeepMind were involved in a secret bidding war for Hinton’s team. Although Baidu ultimately lost the auction, it was the first time that a Chinese company felt that the international giants were sparing no effort in investing in AI.
In less than a year after ChatGPT shocked the world, OpenAI called out a sky-high annual salary of $10 million to recruit. The nervousness is also beginning to be felt in China, as First Finance reported in 2023 that a professor at a software engineering-related lab at Peking University said that before the students on his team graduated, there were big companies poaching them with millions of dollars in annual salaries.
And now, as AI applications are spread out in daily life, the dividends of AI careers, too, continue to sink from a very few top talents Diffusion.
According to China Newsweek, at present, the monthly base salary offered by ByteDance to some master’s degree graduated AI talents reaches 50,000 60,000 yuan, and the monthly base salary of non-talent program candidates can also reach about 40,000 yuan The monthly base salary of non-talent program candidates from two large factories in Ali Tencent is about 30,000 yuan.
Hunting big data, on the other hand, shows that about 31 72 38 34 38 71 algorithm engineers deep learning machine learning related positions, the annual salary is more than 500,000 yuan.
More and more people want to seize the current opportunity.
2025 Top 5 segmented functions with the highest year-on-year growth in newly posted jobs in the first week of the new spring season Photo source Hire
The market is really quite good, and some companies are now offering higher prices. Lin Zhou, an AI algorithm engineer in Shanghai, has also been on the sidelines recently, waiting for a chance to find a better opportunity in a bigger market.
Speaking of the expected salary increase, he told us that he hoped it could be more than 50 percent.
HR is looking forward to it almost every day.
Just as code has shaped our lives as office workers, taxi drivers, and take-out orders, the foundation of people’s daily lives in the future may be AI.
IDC predicts that by 2026, two-thirds of cloud applications will use AI, and 80% of organizations are expected to need AI skilled workers.
McKinsey & Company has also predicted that by 2030, China’s demand for skilled AI specialists will grow to six times that of 2022, reaching 6 million, but by then, China’s supply of AI talent will only reach 2 million, leaving a gap of 4 million people.
McKinsey has released a study on the economic potential of generative AI, in which analysts explored the impact on the global economy behind the exponential growth of AI through a study of 850 occupations in 47 countries and regions with a global labor force of more than 80
Internet manufacturers in this year’s school recruitment has shown a huge demand for AI skilled workers. on February 27, Alibaba spring recruitment was officially launched, ali official introduction, in the 3,000 internship positions open, nearly 50% of the Chengdu and AI-related, part of the AI business sector accounted for a higher proportion, gaude AI-related positions accounted for about 65, ali cloud more than 80 .
Everything points to the fact that the AI industry is very short of people.
Hunting big data shows that as of January 2025, the hunting platform AI technology overall talent shortage index TSI is 3 24, TSL 1 that is, the supply exceeds the demand, which indicates that the AI technology talent is in a state of high shortage.
HR is waiting for them almost every day. New One Technology, which specializes in AI video generation, told us. At present, the company is in urgent need of both AI specialized talents, such as AI algorithm engineers model optimization engineers, etc., and AI scene direction operators who know the industry scene.
AI lack of people, on the one hand, stems from the bright prospects of the market is hot.
On the other hand, there is really a pain point for enterprises in employing people.
A technology company has told the media that when recruiting big model algorithm engineers, only 1 person out of 400 may be in the field, and only dabble in a certain direction, not a comprehensive talent.
For job seekers, the first thing they see is the high threshold. Zhuang Cheng said, algorithm post is one of the most core positions in the AI industry, its high salary is desirable, but the requirements are also very high, many require academic background and thesis results.
Mr. Zhang Zhengsheng told us that when recruiting AI technical talents, the first focus on whether the candidate has a strong basic ability, and the second to see whether the candidate has a systematic ability to stand in the global perspective to understand the role of the technical problems they solve on the upstream and downstream.
The practical hands-on ability of AI talents is very important, efficiency may always be the pursuit of AI enterprises, and the foundation is very good students can provide assurance of efficiency. Zhang Zhengsheng said.
According to him to us, at present, the company employs AI technology employees, not only computer communication background, but also from the mechanical electronic integrated circuit graduates. Science and engineering students have more resources within the university to learn about the development trend of AI, and a lot of their eventual ability to step into the industry is the result of self-driven learning.
Lin Zhou, who majored in mathematics, taught himself programming on campus. around 2020, he became interested in AI, and came into contact with NLP Natural Language Processing, a specific direction of AI, and prepared for a career in AI. Lin Zhou said that math students are suitable for studying AI because the core of AI is algorithms, which consist of various mathematical formulas.
Hard AI technical fundamentals is one aspect, for a large number of positions oriented to specific business, it also requires candidates to have sufficient industry knowledge. In the market, such composite talents are few and far between.
Zhang Zhengsheng said that after several years of development, hyperparameter has become more important to commercialization landing from the initial technology-oriented. At this stage, he found that talents who understand both AI technology and business scenarios are very scarce.
In practice, there is always a gap between technology and landing. NewOne Technology also told us that although a large number of AI-related majors have been opened in domestic universities in recent years, there is a gap between talent training and the actual needs of the industry, resulting in a short period of time that these AI seeds are difficult to meet the real needs of enterprises.
Bubble Stars and the sea
IT laborers are the most rapidly developing group in the post-industrial era, and they are also the backbone of a country’s middle class.
Economist Xiao Zhuoji once judged at the beginning of the 21st century that the future middle class in China would first come from scientific and technological personnel who could transform their achievements into industries, and who invested in enterprises in the form of technology shares, and could receive large dividends if the enterprises went public.
Later, such a wealth story has been true many times. When the bell rang for the listing of Internet giants, China had tens of thousands of multi-millionaires overnight.
What can make AI talents boil up is not only the real salary, but also a kind of promise for the future.
Rising stocks are one of those promises. In the war of grabbing people with Google, OpenAI opened a big tempting conditions is shares, OpenAI allows employees to sell stock shares to investors on a regular basis, and in a reasonable expectation, OpenAI’s valuation will continue to go up.
Another promise, related to technical ambitions, or ideals. Late L a tepost has reported that the technical backbone of an AI unicorn, when jumping ship, said that he wanted to run to the AGI dream.
Powerful technology is always fascinating and attracts countless people. Lin Zhou said that his current company is business oriented, and he hopes to go to a pure big model company.
The prospect is bright, but the road to the other side is full of thorns. Both the huge capital needs and the uncertainty of landing have posed challenges to AI entrants.
According to media reports, five of the six dragons of AI focused on the development of domestic large models had staff adjustments in the second half of last year, for example, Wisdom Spectrum AI was once downsized by hundreds of people last year, and a number of delivery sales staff left MiniMax’s commercialization and part of the product operations team had a total attrition of about 50 people.
This is the situation of AI startups.
On the other hand, from the mobile Internet era to fight over the big companies know better not to put eggs in the same basket, they are in the text, graphics or video and other large models of the base of the development of more or less internal resource team competition, such as in the same direction of the establishment of a number of groups for horse racing. What happens to the employees who lose in the competition is an open question.
Zhang Zhengsheng remains optimistic about the future, more and more people recognize that this is a new round of information technology revolution, more and more people feel that we are in the middle of a great wave .
Tesla humanoid robot image source Tesla Optimus
Although there may be a certain bubble, the attention of society and the gesture of the big manufacturers to enter the game have accumulated into a kind of potential energy related to AI, changing the direction of the flow of resources, just like a warm ocean current, will bring more funds to AI, talent and people’s determination to invest, these nutrients will eventually lead to the technology to really land.
The era of technology ultimately belongs to talent. Lin Zhou is lying on the warm ocean current of this era, but he maintains a simple and open pragmatic attitude.
Living is the most important. He said If the road of AI does not work, go back home and take the civil service exam.
At the request of the interviewer, Zhuang Cheng Lin Zhou are pseudonyms.
This article is reprinted from the public number salt financial ID nfc yancaijing, author Zhang Danjun.
good article recommendation
Typography Positive wind
Editor: Positive Wind Editor-in-Chief: Xia Kun
Leave a Reply