Top AI Talent Earns Annual Salary of 5 Million, Internet Giants Tighten Recruitment

Domestic internet giants are tightening recruitment quotas, but are willing to break salary limits for top AI talent. Some outstanding fresh graduates in foundational model directions have annual packages reaching 2 million yuan, with ByteDance Seed and Xiaohongshu offering the highest bids of 4 to 5 million yuan, while Baidu is in the range of 2 to 3 million yuan. The high salaries for talent acquisition have led to internal salary discrepancies, where some employees in foundational models at lower levels are earning more than their higher-level colleagues. A similar situation arose back in 2017, when an old engineer recalled that a fresh graduate who joined a year later and was at a lower level was earning 10,000 yuan more than him per month, causing the team to lose about 10% of its members each month at one point. Headhunters indicate that positions on the application side are shrinking, while foundational model teams still lack talent capable of training large models. Coding Agents, model evaluation, pre-training data, and Agent infrastructure have become new focal points for talent acquisition. DeepSeek has recently expanded its recruitment for backend developers and Agent Infra engineers, while the hiring enthusiasm in areas like AI search has decreased. Companies are placing more importance on whether candidates have actually trained large-scale models in leading teams, and the salaries and responsibilities of scarce talents can be negotiated separately, making competition fiercer for ordinary AI job seekers.

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