Big tech companies face a salary inversion for AI talent, with top fresh graduates earning up to 5 million annually

According to Beating reports, Lei Feng Network interviewed several headhunters and found that major domestic internet companies are tightening their recruitment quotas but are still willing to break salary limits for top AI talents. Headhunters revealed that this year, some outstanding fresh graduates in foundational model directions have annual packages reaching 2 million yuan; ByteDance Seed and Xiaohongshu's highest offers have reached 4 million to 5 million yuan, while Baidu is in the range of 2 million to 3 million yuan.

The high salaries for talent are exacerbating internal salary discrepancies. An internet professional stated that some employees in foundational models have lower job levels but earn more than their higher-level colleagues. Similar situations emerged as early as 2017; an experienced engineer recalled that at that time, a returnee fresh graduate who joined a year later and was at a lower job level had a monthly salary 10,000 yuan higher than his own, leading to a monthly turnover of about 10% in a team of over thirty people.

Headhunters noted that application-side positions are shrinking, while foundational model teams still lack individuals who can truly train large models. Coding Agents, model evaluation, pre-training data, and Agent infrastructure have become new focal points for talent acquisition; DeepSeek has recently been expanding its recruitment for backend developers and Agent Infra engineers, while the hiring enthusiasm in areas like AI search has decreased. Companies are not only looking at academic qualifications and papers but also place greater importance on whether candidates have actually trained large-scale models in leading teams; the salaries and responsibilities of scarce talents can be negotiated separately, while competition among ordinary AI job seekers is more intense.