China lures AI talent with hefty salary premium as demand far exceeds supply, report finds

Employers in China are scrambling for talent with skills in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), the technology underpinning a new generation of highly intelligent chatbots led by Microsoft-backed OpenAI's ChatGPT.

Computer vision engineers with GenAI skills are being offered an average annual salary of more than 480,000 yuan (US$66,700), about two-thirds higher than the 290,000 yuan earned by their peers without such knowledge, according to a recent report published by Chinese recruitment agency Liepin.

Similar pay discrepancies exist in other tech roles, ranging from software architects to algorithm engineers and programmers.

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Chinese companies are eagerly playing catch-up in GenAI after the public release of ChatGPT by San Francisco-based OpenAI in late 2022. Big Tech firms - including search engine Baidu and e-commerce giant Alibaba Group Holding - and smaller start-ups in China have launched more than 200 large language models.

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The recent debut of Sora by OpenAI has fanned further enthusiasm in China over text-to-video generation technology.

Chinese members in the Sora team have been hailed as heroes in their home country for "shining on the international stage". AI start-ups - such as Beijing-based Moonshot AI, which raised US$1 billion in a recent funding round - are trumpeting the value of GenAI.

The number of jobs listings on Liepin demanding GenAI skills increased by more than 179 per cent year on year in the first 10 months of 2023, the platform said. Almost 60 per cent of the companies surveyed said that they preferred candidates with higher GenAI literacy.

Jobseekers taking on less technical roles - such as account sales, content and social media operations, as well as graphics and visual design - are better paid if they have GenAI skills, Liepin found.

While the demand for AI talent is high, there is a lack of suitable candidates.

For every five new jobs in AI in China, there are only two qualified workers in the market, according to a report published late last year by Maimai, a career social network.

Some of the top Chinese AI talent have chosen to work overseas.

At OpenAI, two of the 13 members on the Sora development team have been identified as coming from China. Jing Li studied at Wuhan No 2 High School in central Hubei province, while Ricky Wang Yu went to NSFZ, the high school affiliated with Nanjing Normal University in eastern Jiangsu province, according to local media reports.

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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