Hiring data tells you Top 10 Chinese Company in the race to hire AI Talent

Every December, machine learning fans flock to the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems, or NeurIPS. It's pretty much the hottest AI event where everyone shows off and chats about their research. A friend of mine described it as the “EDM for STEM major nerds.”

Not surprisingly, this year’s NeurIPS is set to be the biggest ever. According to the committee, they received 12,343 research papers, with an acceptance rate of 26.1%. Notably, four out of six awards pertained to LLMs. This was also the first impression of many attendees I spoke with, “Everyone is talking about generative AI, Diffusion Models, Foundation Models, and LLMs.” My screen was filled with students' selfies with Jeff Dean and Yann LeCun.

It's also a prime spot for PhD students to look for jobs in academia and the industry. Tech giants generously distribute their company swag. But one PhD student from the University of Texas told me that the salary packages aren’t what they used to be. Meanwhile, Chinese giants like Alibaba, Tencent, Huawei, Ant Group, and the buzzworthy startup Zhipu were in New Orleans, all hunting for talent to fill their AI gaps.

Here’s Louise Matsakis at Semafor：

The interesting thing is, most of the PhD students I chatted with mentioned that Chinese companies have been showing up less at various AI conferences over the past year compared to before. They did spot some Chinese company booths, but they were pretty quiet, with just a few people around or only a couple of posters on display.

I asked them about the reasons for this change, and almost everyone gave me the same answer. Under the shadow of the tense situation between Beijing and Washington regarding advanced technology, the biggest issue for Chinese companies is getting visas. Another reason is that tech giants in China are currently adjusting their organizational structures for cost reduction and efficiency improvement.

I used MaiMai's report, a leading Chinese recruitment site, to analyze the AI job market and talent strategies of Chinese companies. Their latest insights (as of Oct 23) were quite revealing.

First, let's look at the most in-demand AI positions in China. MaiMai's Talent supply-demand rate reveals that for two consecutive years, Autonomous Driving Systems Engineer, with a supply-demand ratio of 0.38, is the most sought-after role. This means there are about 2 candidates for every 5 positions.

While there's some easing in AI role shortages compared to 2022, with speech recognition and AI engineers catching up quickly, algorithm engineers still have a supply-demand ratio below 0.5.

And we have some new positions this year: ChatGPT Researchers! I wasn't sure what this job entails, so I checked some job search apps. The descriptions are vague, mostly about training chatbots for specific applications using ChatGPT. Despite the ambiguity, ChatGPT Researchers top the high-salary list with an average monthly wage of $10,000. (I promise to find some ChatGPT researchers to talk to for a future story!)

Next, let's check out the top 10 Chinese companies racing for AI talent.

ByteDance is at the top again for posting the most AI jobs, even though they've slowed down a bit in the last two years. According to the report, this tech giant is a major player in the internet industry for both attracting and sourcing talent.

Even smaller internet firms like Xiaohongshu and Meituan are diving into the AI talent hunt.

As the chart shows, Alibaba's back in the game, picking up the pace in AI hiring. With their new CEO, Eddie Yongming Wu, on board since September, they're all about putting users first and driving with AI. Their AI job posts have shot up 4.6 times since 2022. Most of these gigs are at their e-commerce giant TaoTian Group, where they're crazy about hiring algorithm engineers – the demand's grown more than ten times over the past year

That's all for this new 'A-Charts' series analysis. I'm pumped to see more AI jobs popping up next year and curious about which companies will join the AI talent race.

Got any data or thoughts on this? Did you enjoy today's piece? I'm always here for a chat at [email protected].