Chinese tech companies are scrambling to recruit top AI talent amid a supply shortage

Chinese tech companies are looking to hire more artificial intelligence (AI) talent, especially anyone with a track record of success, amid a shortage of top AI brains in the country, according to local media reports and data from the sector.

Moonshot AI, one of the country’s top AI startups, has recruited Tan Xu, the former principal research manager for the Machine Learning Group at Microsoft Research Asia. The Beijing-based company called Tan the “top expert in audio technology and machine learning.”

“(Tan) will work with the team to research and develop more advanced and useful intelligent assistants for Kimi users,” the company said in a statement on Friday, referring to its Kimi AI chatbot.

Other Chinese companies are stepping up similar efforts to enlist top industry experts to build competitive services. TikTok parent company ByteDance is running an aggressive recruitment program targeting talent from AI startups such as 01.AI, co-founded by former Google China head Lee Kai-fu, and Beijing-based Seq-AI, according to reports in the local media.

According to local media, ByteDance’s latest high-profile hire is Zhou Chang, an AI scientist from Alibaba Group Holding. Zhou was one of the key researchers behind Alibaba’s Tongyi Qianwen large language model (LLM). ByteDance declined to comment. Alibaba, which owns the South China Morning Post, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.