China’s booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry has a plethora of job openings but not enough talent to fill them, according to a recent report from Maimai, a Chinese professional online network similar to LinkedIn.
A quarter of openings among the top 20 “new economy” job types on Maimai this year through October were directly related to AI, the company revealed in a report published this week. Related roles include algorithm engineer, AI engineer, recommendation algorithm engineer, large language model (LLM) specialist, and natural language processing expert.
Cloud computing remains the tightest market, with a supply-demand ratio of 0.27, or roughly four job openings per qualified candidate. Search algorithms follow closely with a ratio of 0.39, or more than two openings per candidate.
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AI has emerged as a bright spot in a bleak domestic job market in China’s “new economy”, a term used to describe high-growth sectors such as information technology, healthcare and renewable energy.
In general, China’s job market for the country’s top brains remains tight with two jobseekers jostling for each opening. In the first 10 months of 2024, the ratio further escalated to 2.06, highlighting intense competition among those looking for work, especially in the new energy vehicle industry, which climbed from 1.77 to 2.04, according to the report.
As business activity around generative AI has exploded over the past couple of years, Chinese Big Tech firms have become engaged in a bitter war for talent in the field. In one posting to the recruitment platform Liepin, a company was offering an annual salary of up to 5 million yuan (US$686,000) for a LLM team leader based in Beijing.
At e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the South China Morning Post, six of the top 10 positions with a supply-demand ratio below 1 were AI-related, according to the report. At Xiaohongshu, an Instagram-like social network, nine of those positions were in AI.
Across the tech industry in general, TikTok owner ByteDance created the largest number of new jobs in the first 10 months of the year, followed by Chinese food delivery giant Meituan and Xiaohongshu, the report found.
Alibaba was the fourth largest recruiter, followed by its fintech affiliate Ant Group and Tencent Holdings.
At the same time, average monthly salary offers for top talent increased slightly to 42,874 yuan in the period, significantly higher than the national average. Average disposable income in China was 30,941 yuan in the first nine months of 2024, according to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, or less than 3,500 yuan per month.
China’s tech giants are also increasingly looking to place top domestic talent overseas, as the companies expand in other markets in search of new growth. The top three highest-paying overseas positions at Chinese companies are deep learning expert, AI engineer, and AI generated content algorithm engineer.
This article originally appeared in the South China Morning Post (SCMP), the most authoritative voice reporting on China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, please explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP’s Facebook and Twitter pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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