"The compensation is too shocking."
It all started with a trending topic on Weibo this week: a student from the Tsinghua Yao Class shared an offer with a daily internship salary of 5,500 yuan, pre-tax.
Calculated based on 22 working days per month, the monthly salary exceeds 120,000 yuan.
Although this salary targets a small number of students like those from the Tsinghua Yao Class, it still offers a glimpse into the intense competition for AI talent. The AI wealth creation wave is sweeping in, and within it, talent has become the most crucial trump card, often capable of changing the direction of the tide.
DeepSeek Intern
Daily Salary of 5500 Yuan
After raising 50 billion yuan in its first round of financing, DeepSeek has become flush with cash.
However, considering the talent background, this daily intern salary might not be that exaggerated. The Tsinghua Yao Class, founded in 2005 by Turing Award winner Academician Yao Qizhi, was originally intended to cultivate the world's top computer science talents. It enrolls only a few dozen students each year, all of whom are the crème de la crème.
As an AI headhunter friend frankly stated: "It sounds a bit exaggerated for domestic large model companies to offer such sky-high prices, but for DeepSeek , it's not surprising. People might even discuss whether it's too low."
The background of this statement is that Liang Wenfeng is going all out in recruiting.
Not long ago, DeepSeek released recruitment information through its official account, planning to at least double the size of all departments. It opened 7 major categories with 33 positions, including algorithm, R&D, operations, product, data engineering, and functional departments. All positions accept interns.
"Humanity is currently on the eve of AGI. Join DeepSeek , personally experience the development process of AGI, sit in the front row of the era, and witness the birth of a new epoch." DeepSeek wrote emotionally on the recruitment poster.
Such a declaration directly appeals to young people with dreams.
Even earlier, Cui Tianyi, the head of the Harness team at DeepSeek , revealed in a post that as a newly established department, Harness was still "severely understaffed," and he was "interviewing every day and posting small recruitment ads on various platforms."
This is not surprising.
The Bloomberg Billionaires Index shows that Liang Wenfeng's personal wealth has surged from about $16.7 billion to $36 billion (approximately 244 billion RMB), surpassing Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei and OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman, making him the world's highest-valued AI model founder.
Big Tech Companies Compete for Interns
This wave of AI offers is truly irresistible.
"Willing to work overtime." Recently, an undergraduate claiming to be a Huawei summer intern posted that the offer provided a base monthly salary of 10,000 yuan, along with lavish supper and various snacks and fruits available after 8:30 PM.
This year, Tencent's announced "Qingyun Internship Program" proposes no grade restrictions and no upper limit on compensation. Interns have the opportunity to directly participate in or even lead core projects like the Hunyuan large model, Yuanbao AI, and the WeChat ecosystem, receiving considerable returns.
ByteDance is not far behind, having launched its largest-ever "ByteIntern" internship-to-full-time recruitment drive early on, offering over 7,000 offers with a conversion rate above 50%.
Even before leaving campus, big tech companies are eagerly extending olive branches, simply because in the increasingly fierce AI competition, discovering a potential seedling has become more urgent than ever.
As early as the end of 2025, Business Insider disclosed a set of data — for a 4-6 month AI internship or short-term research project, monthly salaries had already reached the $7,000-$18,000 range, equivalent to approximately 49,000-126,000 RMB.
Pulling the focus back to China, companies are even reaching out to earlier points: Tencent launched the Spark Program for high school students; in 2025, ByteDance established the Zhichun Innovation Center, planning to recruit 30 "full-time research trainees" aged 16-18 annually; similar training programs for top young AI talents have also appeared at JD.com.
Equally impressive is Moonshot AI's announcement of the Kimi top talent "Transcendence Plan," which grants company stock options to interns who haven't graduated yet. It is reported that all students already interning at Kimi or about to intern at Kimi, regardless of their graduation year, who perform outstandingly during their 3-6 month internship and pass the internship-to-full-time conversion assessment, can receive a formal Kimi "Transcendence Plan" offer. The company will grant them options at the price applicable when their internship started in 2026, lock in the number of shares, and start calculating the vesting period.
Going round and round, the talent war has finally spread to young people who haven't even left campus yet.
Changing the Direction of the Tide
Each Generation Has Its Own Era of Opportunity
The AI talent market is experiencing its craziest year yet.
Looking back, AI researchers commonly had annual salaries around one million, but now tens of millions are becoming increasingly common. DeepSeek 's rise over the past few years has made the industry realize that an extremely small number of talents can often bring disruptive results, and for god-level figures, money should be no object.
This scene has already been validated overseas. Talent rapidly circulates among giants like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, while big tech companies compete to bring potential stars into their business lines. It's not just about competing on price, but also on speed.
Even internal Meta emails showed that Mark Zuckerberg personally listed an "AI Talent Hunting List," targeting elites under 30 with experience in top labs.
At this moment, traditional recruitment is no longer applicable — now, major companies like ByteDance, Huawei, Pinduoduo, and Tencent always start their seasonal recruitment or internship programs ahead of schedule. The traditional "Golden September, Silver October" has turned into "Golden July, Silver August" or even earlier.
The annual compensation packages these companies offer to fresh graduates are generally at the million-yuan level, with outstanding candidates reaching several million. According to a report by LatePost, in 2024, ByteDance's Top Seed campus hires had an annual salary of about 1.5 million yuan, which rose to 3-5 million yuan in 2025, and for some core positions in 2026, it even reached 6 million yuan, doubling year after year.
Looking at the situation, current AI talent has distinct characteristics — young, from prestigious schools, high potential, and highly malleable. They often live in the AI Native era, have few burdens themselves, and can adapt well to the iterative pace of the AI era.
A symbolic moment was when Tencent appointed 27-year-old former OpenAI researcher Yao Shunyu as Chief AI Scientist, fully responsible for large model infrastructure; almost simultaneously, Luo Fuli, the post-95s large model head who joined Xiaomi, stepped into the spotlight — Lei Jun had publicly revealed his hope to hire her with an annual salary of tens of millions to lead large model research.
Quietly, the younger generation is rapidly stepping into the center of the stage.
Ultimately, AI competition is never just a contest of models and computing power; it is also a contest of talent density. The more decisive change is: more and more highly educated young people are moving to the center — they will determine how the next round of the AI landscape will be reshaped.
This article is from the WeChat public account "Investment Community" (ID: pedaily2012), author: Yu Mengying.
