China is facing a shortage of AI talent in the developing ‘new economy’ sector, a report says
China’s booming artificial intelligence (AI) industry has plenty 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 in Maimai this year to 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-scale language modeling (LLM) specialist, and natural language processing specialist.
Cloud computing remains a strong market, with a supply ratio of 0.27, or about four job openings for every qualified candidate. Search algorithms follow closely with an average of 0.39, or more than two openings per candidate.
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AI has emerged as a bright spot in a dim job market in China’s “new economy,” a term used to describe high-growth sectors such as information technology, health care and renewable energy.
Overall, China’s job market for the country’s top intellectuals remains tight as two job seekers compete for each opening. In the first 10 months of 2024, the ratio rose again to 2.06, highlighting the intense competition among job seekers, especially in the new energy vehicle industry, which rose from 1.77 to 2.04, according to the report.
As business activities around productive AI have exploded in the past few years, China’s Big Tech firms are engaged in a fierce battle for talent in the field. In another posting on recruiting site Liepin, the company was offering an annual salary of up to 5 million yuan (US$686,000) to an 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 ratio of less than 1 were related to AI, according to the report. At Xiaohongshu, a social media platform similar to Instagram, nine of those positions were in AI.
Across the technology sector, TikTok owner ByteDance created the largest number of new jobs in the first 10 months of the year, followed by Chinese giants Meituan and Xiaohongshu, the report found.
Alibaba was the fourth largest employer, followed by fintech partners Ant Group and Tencent Holdings.
