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AI sector a bright spot in tough jobs market for China’s graduates, as ChatGPT frenzy spurs new employer demand

  • China’s youth jobless rate has hit a new high, with conditions mostly tough for the country’s 11.6 million fresh graduates
  • Job offers for graduates with degrees in large language models and related areas of AI have surged, according to Liepin report

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AI a rare hotspot in China’s graduate jobs market, report finds. Photo: AFP
Ben Jiangin Beijing
A surge in the number of job offers in China’s artificial intelligence (AI) sector for college graduates has become one of the few bright spots in an otherwise bleak jobs market, according to a report by a local recruitment platform.

While China’s youth jobless rate has hit a new high and with conditions mostly tough for the country’s 11.6 million fresh graduates, those with degrees related to large language models (LLMs), the AI technology behind the rise of Microsoft-backed OpenAI’s ChatGPT, are in short supply.

In this space, the number of related job openings has surged 172.5 per cent from a year earlier, according to Liepin’s 2023 employment report for Chinese university graduates.

San Francisco-based OpenAI launched its conversational bot ChatGPT last autumn, setting off a global AI arms race, with Chinese Big Tech firms rushing to launch similar services.

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A local headhunter said earlier that the explosion in demand for AI jobs started a while ago.

“Since late last year, we have been getting increased inquiries from local tech firms looking for talent working in LLMs and AI-generated content, and some are willing to offer fat pay cheques,” Max Xiao Mafeng, co-founder and CEO at recruitment agency TTC Consultancy, told the Post in April.

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