(Yicai) Aug. 7 -- Major Chinese internet companies have moved up their recruitment plans for fresh graduates from autumn to summer to snap up artificial intelligence talents ahead of their competitors.

Alibaba Group Holding and its 16 business subsidiaries, including Alibaba Cloud, began recruiting fresh graduates on Aug. 5. The job offerings cover eight categories, including algorithms, research and development, chips, and products, with AI positions accounting for 80 percent of the total. 

ByteDance also started campus recruitment this week, with technology and product positions accounting for over 70 percent of the total. Demand for product positions jumped 20 percent, of which more than half were AI products, the firm noted, adding that demand for algorithm positions also increased. Jobs for AI full-stack engineers and AI agent developers were opened for the first time.

Baidu launched its autumn recruitment scheme last month, and DeepSeek started fishing for talent as early as June.

Internet giants and unicorns are competing on all fronts, from models, applications, and computing power bases to consumer-end entrances, and their demand for AI talents is becoming more urgent and refined.

“The ahead-of-schedule recruitment of internet giants is essentially an ‘arms race’ in the AI industry that forces the competition cycle for talents to move forward,” said Guo Tao, an angel investor and senior AI expert.

AI talents are needed throughout the whole industry, given the expansion of related positions, he noted, adding that the supply of hands-on engineers who master skills in model implementation, AI agent development, and computing power optimization cannot keep up with the speed of business expansion.

“Demand for AI talents at internet giants has broken away from the single framework of algorithm development and shifted to deepening technical expertise vertically and ‌cross-boundary composite horizontal expansion, broadening the scope of positions,” Guo said.

AI full-stack engineers and talents in AI agent process development and large language model engineering have become hotspots in recruitment, Guo pointed out. Enterprises no longer only value model training ability, but also emphasize the full chain practical ability from model encapsulation and tool calling to business implementation. Demand for vertical business positions, such as token scheduling and ‌customized LLM solutions for office scenarios, is rising rapidly.

Alibaba has added AI coding to the written exams of Alibaba Cloud, Qwen Division‌, and Cainiao to assess technical talents this year, allowing fresh graduates to call AI tools in a controlled environment to complete project development tasks.

However, with the rapid growth of AI unicorns and leading companies in emerging industries, such as embodied AI, internet giants may not be the most attractive option for talent, a job hunter told Yicai.

Editor: Futura Costaglione