China, which is emerging as a significant challenger to the U.S. in the field of artificial intelligence (AI), has already become a hub for top-tier AI talent and is attracting global AI professionals to bolster its position. Increasingly, high-level AI personnel who gained experience in the U.S. and other regions are returning to China to establish unicorn startups (companies valued at over $1 billion). A virtuous cycle is also evident as big tech companies like Tencent and Alibaba, which have grown based on China’s massive domestic market, are backing and nurturing talent.
Chinese tech companies have recently been ramping up efforts to recruit AI talent by offering high salaries. Alibaba, ByteDance, and Baidu are actively recruiting in their Silicon Valley offices. The Financial Times (FT) reported that Alibaba has not only posted job openings for AI talent in the U.S. via LinkedIn but is also closely approaching engineers from major American tech companies like OpenAI. The report added that Alibaba entices talent with high salaries and stock options and offers to spin off Silicon Valley AI teams into separate startups.
ByteDance, the operator of TikTok, is also actively expanding its AI workforce despite ongoing controversies over potential forced divestment. Similarly, Baidu, known as China’s Google, operates an AI research lab in Silicon Valley and has hired hundreds of personnel specializing in voice recognition and autonomous driving. Having already secured one of the world’s largest pools of AI talent, China is now absorbing global AI professionals. According to the U.S. think tank MacroPolo, in 2022, the undergraduate origins of the top 2% of AI researchers showed 28% from the U.S. and 26% from China. Tsinghua University and Peking University ranked third and sixth among the world’s top 25 AI research institutions.
More individuals with experience at global big tech firms are now starting their businesses in China. A Chinese startup information provider, ITJuzi, tracked 1,400 AI startup founders in China and found that 156 were former Microsoft employees, and 104 had previously worked at Google.
Moonshot AI, which recently gained attention for launching a math reasoning AI model comparable to OpenAI’s o1, was founded by Yang Zhilin, a former researcher at Facebook AI Research and Google Brain. Moonshot AI recently hired Tan Xu, the lead researcher for the machine learning group at Microsoft Research Asia. Another generative AI startup, Lingyiwanwu, was founded by Li Kaifu, a former president of Google China. Lingyiwanwu has released a model comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4, and Li recently asserted that the gap between Chinese and American generative AI is only six months.
Some of these startups are also entering the U.S. market, following in TikTok’s footsteps. MiniMax, backed by investments from Alibaba and Tencent, has gained popularity among American teenagers with its avatar chatbot app “Toki.” According to market research firm Sensor Tower, Toki was the twelfth most downloaded AI app worldwide from January to August. Although only in its third year, MiniMax is expected to generate $70 million in revenue this year.
Chinese big tech companies strongly support the rapid growth of Chinese AI startups. As of last year, five AI unicorn startups have emerged in China, including Zhipu AI, Moonshot AI, MiniMax, Baichuan Intelligence, and Lingyiwanwu. Most investors behind these companies are major Chinese tech firms such as Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu, Xiaomi, and Didi Chuxing. In the first four months of 2024, 262 generative AI startups in China raised $1.97 billion.
The Chinese government also supports AI development at the national level. According to the National Information Society Agency (NIA) in South Korea, China’s AI research and development (R&D) investment, which was just $1.14 billion in 2015, doubled to approximately $2.11 billion in 2023. In 2017, the Chinese government introduced its Next Generation AI Development Plan to reach the highest global levels in AI theory, technology, and application by 2030.
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