(Yicai) June 16 -- Tencent Holdings is staging a high‑stakes, global algorithm competition -- the Chinese tech giant’s first with a prize pool of over CNY3 million (USD418,000) and direct job offers -- as a way to identify and recruit outstanding graduates in artificial intelligence and algorithm development.

Teams will vie for a top prize of CNY2 million, Shenzhen-based Tencent announced today. CNY600,000 will be awarded to the runner-ups, CNY300,000 to the third-placed team, and CNY100,000 each to those coming in fourth through 10th. Members of the top 10 teams are also guaranteed full-time jobs at Tencent, while finalists may receive formal job offers and semi-finalists will be offered internships, it added.

Tencent's advertising platform is hosting the competition, called All-Modality Generative Recommendation, which has a large, de-identified dataset from Tencent’s ad business. The contest is powered by Tencent’s Angel Machine Learning Platform, which supplies the computing resources and a training inference platform. AMLP also supports the research and development of the firm's Hunyuan large language model and its business applications.

The event will see university students from around the world invited to tackle real-world AI challenges by developing models that predict users’ next likely interactions with ads based on anonymized, multi-modal behavioral data.

AI made a big contribution to Tencent's earnings from its advertising business in the first quarter, with revenue from marketing services jumping 20 percent to CNY31.9 billion (USD4.4 billion) from a year earlier, according to the firm's latest financial report.

In April, Tencent launched its largest-ever recruitment drive, aiming to add 28,000 internships over the next three years and increase the conversion rate to full-time employment. As part of this year’s hiring process, 60 percent of internships are open to tech talent in LLMs, algorithms, cloud computing, and other key areas.

Editor: Martin Kadiev