Big tech firms face AI talent pay inversion: top new graduates’ annual compensation packages reach nearly 5 million yuan, while senior employees with higher job levels earn less.

Beating AI News: Interviews with multiple headhunters by Lei Feng Network reveal that major Chinese internet giants are tightening recruitment quotas, yet still willing to break salary caps for top AI talents. Headhunters disclosed that this year, outstanding fresh graduates specializing in foundational models have secured annual packages reaching the 2 million yuan mark. ByteDance’s Seed program and Xiaohongshu have offered the highest quotes, ranging from 4 million to 5 million yuan, while Baidu’s offers fall between 2 million and 3 million yuan. This high-salary talent race is exacerbating "salary inversion" within major firms. An internet industry insider shared that some foundational model employees, even at lower ranks, now earn more than colleagues at higher levels. Such issues emerged as early as 2017: a veteran engineer recalled that a returnee fresh graduate who joined one year later and held a lower rank earned 10,000 yuan more per month than him, leading to a monthly turnover rate of around 10% for his over-30-person team at the time. However, high salaries have not benefited all AI practitioners. Headhunters noted that application-side roles at major firms are shrinking, while foundational model teams still lack personnel capable of training large models. Coding Agents, model evaluation, pre-training data, and Agent infrastructure have become new key targets in the talent race. DeepSeek has recently been expanding its backend development and Agent infrastructure engineering teams. In contrast, recruitment enthusiasm for areas like AI search has declined. The threshold for this recruitment wave is rising. Companies no longer only focus on academic qualifications and papers, but also value whether candidates have hands-on experience training large models in top teams. For truly scarce talents, compensation and responsibilities can be negotiated separately; ordinary AI job seekers face increasingly fierce competition.