China’s booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry has an abundance 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 the vacancies in the top 20 “new economy” jobs on Maimai from 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 specialist (LLM), and natural language processing expert.
Cloud computing remains the tightest market, with a supply-demand ratio of 0.27, or roughly four vacancies per qualified candidate. Search algorithms follow closely with a ratio of 0.39, or more than two vacancies per candidate.
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AI has emerged as a bright spot in a bleak domestic labor market in China’s “new economy,” a term used to describe fast-growing sectors such as information technology, healthcare and renewable energy.
Overall, China’s labor market for the country’s top brains remains tight, with two job seekers jostling for every vacancy. In the first ten months of 2024, the ratio further escalated to 2.06, highlighting the fierce competition among those looking for work, especially in the new energy vehicle industry, which increased from 1.77 to 2.04, according to the report.
As business activity around generative AI has exploded in recent years, Chinese Big Tech companies have found themselves locked in a bitter war for talent in the field. In a post on recruitment platform Liepin, a company offered an annual salary of up to 5 million yuan ($686,000) for an LLM team leader based in Beijing.
At e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the South China Morning Post, six of the top 10 positions with a supply-demand ratio of less than 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 sector overall, TikTok owner ByteDance created the largest number of new jobs in the first ten 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, the average monthly salary offers for top talent increased slightly to 42,874 yuan during the period, significantly higher than the national average. According to China’s National Bureau of Statistics, the average disposable income in China in the first nine months of 2024 was 30,941 yuan, or less than 3,500 yuan per month.
China’s tech giants are also increasingly looking to hire top domestic talent abroad, as companies expand into other markets in search of new growth. The top three highest-paid foreign 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 covering China and Asia for more than a century. For more SCMP stories, explore the SCMP app or visit the SCMP Facebook page Tweet pages. Copyright © 2024 South China Morning Post Publishers Ltd. All rights reserved.
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