Big Tech AI Talent Pay Inversion: Top New Graduates' Annual Packages Hit $5 Million, While Senior Employees with Higher Job Grades Earn Less

Beating AI News Flash: Leiphone.com interviewed multiple headhunters and found that major Chinese internet companies are tightening recruitment quotas, yet remain willing to break compensation limits for top AI talent. Headhunters revealed that this year, some outstanding fresh graduates in the foundation model direction have reached annual packages in the RMB 2 million range. ByteDance Seed and Xiaohongshu's top-tier offers have even reached RMB 4 million to RMB 5 million, while Baidu is in the RMB 2 million to RMB 3 million range.

High salaries to grab talent are intensifying "salary inversion" within major companies. An internet industry practitioner revealed that some foundation model employees, even at lower job levels, already earn more than higher-level colleagues. Similar problems emerged as early as 2017. An veteran engineer recalled that a returnee fresh graduate who joined a year later and was one job level lower had a monthly salary RMB 10,000 higher than his own. Of a team of more than 30 people, about 10% were lost per month at one point.

But high salaries have not benefited all AI practitioners. Headhunters said application-side positions at major companies are shrinking, while foundation model teams still lack people who can truly train large models. Coding Agent, model evaluation, pre-training data, and Agent infrastructure have become new talent-scouting priorities. DeepSeek has also recently expanded hiring for backend development and Agent Infra engineers. By contrast, hiring enthusiasm for directions such as AI search has already declined.

The threshold for this recruitment wave is getting higher and higher. Companies look not only at academic credentials and papers, but even more at whether candidates have actually trained large-scale models in top teams. For truly scarce talent, compensation and responsibilities can be negotiated separately; ordinary AI job seekers, however, face increasingly fierce competition.