The fervor of graduation season has just receded, and the 2024 hiring season is kicking off with a vengeance.

Recently, Meituan announced the launch of the 2024 campus recruitment, expected to recruit 6,000 fresh graduates. By coincidence, Internet companies such as Shutterbugs and Xiaomi have also launched the 2024 fall recruitment plan.The 21st Century Business Herald reporter found that the above recruiting positions all include robotics algorithms, acoustics, large models, NLP and other artificial intelligence-related fields.

At the same time that big factories open their arms to solicit talents, the job market is also becoming increasingly obvious for the differentiation of educational requirements.

"I'm not considering entering the AI industry for the time being, and my graduation institution and academic qualifications limit the scope of my choices." An ordinary classmate of a college confessed his helplessness and reluctance to the reporter of the 21st Century Business Herald. "There are only small factories that I can get into, but I can't imagine how long a company that lives by burning investors' money can exist."

Under the wave of new technologies, job seekers floating in the job market are also making diverse trade-offs in order to get a relatively certain career future for themselves.

In and Out for Fresh Graduates

Gao Ge is a student of the class of 2022 in the direction of financial technology in the School of Big Data at Fudan University. Being in the cross-discipline of AI and finance, he faces the dilemma of moving towards innovation and returning to tradition. "Because I studied sort of a finance major, but now with the development of AI, the companies I will face in the future will be more or less related to AI."

In the big model has not been so hot in 2021, Gao Ge considered joining a professional artificial intelligence company, but their "technical threshold requirements are particularly high, generally require a doctoral degree, but also require you to have a strong mathematical or computer background," so Gao Ge weighed again and again, or chose to join the traditional finance So Gao Ge weighed the options and chose to join the traditional financial industry.

However, the work he is currently engaged in during his internship is still strongly related to artificial intelligence. "My employment direction is still a securities company, but there will be a lot of things related to AI in my job."

In contrast, Xiao Fang, a graduate student majoring in computer vision and artificial intelligence at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, has a more focused choice. He said that his future career plan must be closely related to AI, and at present he wants to work in areas such as 3D computer vision and multimodal large models. "In the current environment, I think it's a good choice to find a leading company first and join a big team to enhance your industry background."

When it comes to AI startups, Xiao Fang said he is not optimistic. "For now, to create large multimodal models, you first need to have huge computational resources, which are generally not enough for startups. Secondly, startups need long-term capital investment, and current startups can generally only raise angel rounds, and it is difficult to wait until the A round, which is the case for 95% of startups."

Therefore, big factories with strong financial strength and determination to invest in R&D have become Xiao Fang's primary choice.

A teacher responsible for enrollment in the big data college of a domestic 985 university told the 21st Century Business Herald that, specifically, the more popular employment positions of artificial intelligence majors are: algorithm engineers, data processing engineers, machine learning engineers, natural language processing engineers and so on.

Among them, algorithm engineers are one of the most central positions in the field of artificial intelligence. They are responsible for developing and optimizing AI algorithm models, improving algorithm performance and solving practical problems. According to relevant statistics, algorithm engineers are one of the positions with the highest employment ratio of AI graduates, accounting for about 30% of the employment positions. Data processing engineers are professionals responsible for analyzing, mining and modeling massive data. They need to be skilled in data mining, machine learning and other technologies to be able to process and analyze massive data and extract valuable information and patterns.

Machine learning engineers, on the other hand, are mainly responsible for designing, developing and maintaining machine learning models and systems, and optimizing machine learning algorithms and applications. Natural Language Processing Engineers, on the other hand, are professionals responsible for processing and analyzing natural language text, and are able to apply machine learning and deep learning algorithms for text analysis and semantic understanding, applying these skills to natural language processing, speech recognition, intelligent Q&A, and other fields.

AI Layout, Colleges and Universities First

In fact, whenever a new wave of science and technology surging, colleges and universities are always striving to be the "first to eat crabs".

In April this year, the Ministry of Education announced the results of the 2022 annual filing and approval of undergraduate majors in ordinary institutions of higher education, with a total of 1,641 new majors filed nationwide. Among them, the largest number of artificial intelligence majors, the first batch of 35.

According to Gao Runsheng, deputy director of the Department of Science and Technology of the Ministry of Education, at present, 35 colleges and universities have set up new artificial intelligence majors, 101 colleges and universities have set up new robotics engineering majors, 96 colleges and universities have set up new intelligent science and technology majors, 50 colleges and universities have included artificial intelligence training into the "double first-class" training program, 31 colleges and universities have established their own artificial intelligence colleges, 24 colleges and universities have established their own artificial intelligence schools, and 24 colleges and universities have established their own artificial intelligence schools. Thirty-one colleges and universities have set up their own artificial intelligence colleges, and 24 colleges and universities have established artificial intelligence research institutes.

Behind the hot artificial intelligence specialty, reflecting China's huge demand for talents in the field of artificial intelligence. However, after colleges and universities have opened their majors so intensively, China's AI talents are still in a state of oversupply. A report shows that the talent gap in China's artificial intelligence industry is as high as 5 million, and this talent shortage will persist for a long time under the standard of highly interdisciplinary composite talents.

At the same time, a few days ago, the World Conference on Artificial Intelligence released the Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Talent Development White Paper shows that the current scale of China's AI core industry is more than 400 billion yuan, and talent is the key to the competition in AI.

Up to now, the scale of talents in the field of artificial intelligence in Shanghai is 232,000, while the scale of the demand for talents in Shanghai's artificial intelligence industry is about 343,000-414,000 people, which also means that the imbalance of talents is highlighted. In fact, Shanghai is only a microcosm of the talent shortage faced by the artificial intelligence industry, and the talent shortage will persist for a long time under the standard of highly interdisciplinary and complex talents.

However, according to China's higher education statistics in 2022, the employment rate of AI graduates is more than 95%. So where exactly is the flow of talent going this time?

According to relevant statistics, the vast majority of talent still flows into the consumer Internet industry. Sixty percent of the graduates entered Internet and e-commerce enterprises, including Tencent, Alibaba, Baidu and other well-known enterprises; about 30% of the graduates entered high-tech enterprises, including Huawei, Ningde Times, etc.; and a small number of graduates chose to continue their education or take civil service exams and so on.

Besides, the split between industry, academia and research is still troubling every participant in the talent market.

In an interview with the 21st Century Business Herald, Chieh Yuan, director of Fudan University's Artificial Intelligence Innovation and Industry Research Institute, said that the real-world ability of talents is an important part of bridging the gap between colleges and universities and enterprises, which is now calling for the support of hardware. "In the context of the rapid development of science and technology, education is also facing a certain transformation. There are two aspects of this problem, the first is how to make the students' basic theories deeper, and the second is how to make the students' hands-on ability and analytical ability stronger, and combined with the needs of enterprises."

Therefore, like every emerging industry, the rapid development of the AI industry still has its own problems. In addition to the inherent data problems, privacy and security issues, etc., the shackles of the talent problem still require the tripartite efforts of enterprises, markets and universities.