(Yicai) April 9 -- Alibaba Group Holding, Tiktok owner ByteDance, and other leading Chinese internet firms are battling it out for talent in the artificial intelligence arena because of a shortage of qualified professionals.

About 80 percent of the positions available in Alibaba International’s 2026 campus hiring program are AI-related, including algorithm engineers and product managers, according to its recruitment website. Out of ByteDance’s 10,000 job openings, 2,353 are focused on AI. Baidu is hiring for 357 AI-related roles out of a total of 1,357 positions, while Tencent has 332 AI roles open among its 2,567 available jobs.

In addition to campus recruitment, Alibaba International has initiated its first global top-tier AI talent development program, Bravo102. In a break with tradition, this program allows successful candidates to choose which teams and projects they join.

Alibaba's cloud computing arm also announced last month a partnership with 10 Asian universities and government agencies to cultivate AI professionals. Alibaba Cloud aims to recruit technical talent in areas such as large language models, multimodal understanding and generation, model application, and AI infrastructure from top universities, it noted.

The scarcity of top-tier professionals in AI lies behind this intense hiring competition. The supply-to-demand ratio for AI talent in China stands at a mere 0.5, meaning there is just one suitable candidate for every two AI posts, according to a recent report from talent solutions provider Hudson RPO.

The demand for top researchers and engineers far outstrips supply, especially in fields such as reinforcement learning, large model algorithms, and multimodal algorithms, the report said. Discovering and developing more AI talent is becoming a challenge for the entire tech sector, it noted.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Martin Kadiev