Recently, Chen Yu, who wants to take advantage of the "Golden Three, Silver and Fourth" recruitment season to change his work environment, has encountered a little annoyance - every company he invests in will ask him in the final interview whether he can use artificial intelligence-related technologies such as Python and machine learning. As a graduate of EE (Electronic Engineering) more than a decade ago, this is not what he is good at.
"Although I have also taught myself a little bit of these techniques, there are still many gaps with the requirements of the other party. Chen Yu told the first financial reporter. Chen Yu's alma mater, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, has also recently ushered in a new move - the inauguration of the School of Artificial Intelligence.
With the development of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence), both enterprises and universities are paying more attention to artificial intelligence talents.
According to a previous McKinsey report on artificial intelligence, the demand for AI professionals in China is expected to increase sixfold in 2030 compared to 2022. In addition, according to the report released by Liepin at the beginning of this year (hereinafter referred to as the "Report"), in January ~ October 2023, the number of positions requiring mastery of AIGC (generative artificial intelligence) increased by 179.19% year-on-year. The increase in demand for such positions is undoubtedly bringing a new round of organizational change to enterprises.
Enterprises favor AIGC talents
Chen Yu's situation is not unique, as multiple reports show that companies are more willing to pay for talent with AIGC skills.
According to the above-mentioned Liepin report, in January ~ October 2023, 0.04% of job seekers indicated that they would use AIGC skills in their resumes. They were significantly more likely to be approached by companies than job seekers who did not indicate that they had the skill, with 7.95 times for the former and 4.76 times for the latter, indicating that companies were more interested in the former. Under the same conditions, 57.04% of enterprises will give preference to those who can use AIGC tools.
Among the top 20 job seekers with AIGC skills in their resumes, each of them was chatted with more times by the company than the job seekers with the same function who were not indicated, indicating that the company was more interested in the former.
After comparing the top 20 functions with the most distributed positions requiring AIGC skills and those without such requirements, it is found that the average annual salary of the former is generally higher than that of the latter. Among them, the salary gap is the largest is machine vision, the average annual salary of machine vision recruitment requiring AIGC skills is 484,500 yuan, and the average annual salary of machine vision recruitment without this requirement is 298,300 yuan, the former is 62.44% higher than the latter.
Li Zhifei, founder and CEO of Mobvoi and former scientist at Google headquarters, believes that AIGC is a product of the era of large models, and mastering the skills of AIGC tools is valuable for increasing efficiency, especially for the work of enterprise employees. The largest application form of generative AI is Copilot (co-pilot or intelligent assistant), which is essentially AI to help generate content, including text reports, program code, images, videos, and audio.
On a global scale, a large amount of capital and talent in the technology community will be used to implement AI applications. Competition between countries in the field of AI will be fiercer than ever, and much of the competition will revolve around an indispensable input to the AI ecosystem: talent.
According to the Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0 released by the MacroPolo think tank of the Paulson Institute, the United States still overwhelmingly attracts the most talents in the cultivation and introduction of AI talents, but China is catching up.
The survey report says the U.S. remains the top job destination for top AI talent. Among U.S. institutions, U.S. and Chinese researchers (based on undergraduate degrees) account for 75% of top AI talent, up from 58% in 2019. China has expanded its AI talent pool over the past few years to meet the growing demand for the AI industry. At the same time, trends in China and India reflect a broader pattern over the past few years: top AI researchers have generally shown low mobility. In 2022, only 42% of top AI researchers went overseas to work, down 13 percentage points from 2019. This change shows that more and more top talent is choosing to stay in their home countries.
Top AI researchers (top 20%) are currently working in the country where the organization is headquartered Source: Global AI Talent Tracker 2.0
The talent gap is 5 million
"The total talent gap in the field of artificial intelligence in China is 5 million. Shanghai's demand for 400,000 in 2025 is 40,000, while the number of students enrolled in local universities with related majors is 40,000. During the 2023 World Artificial Intelligence Conference, Qiu Xin, Secretary of the Party Committee of Fudan University, gave this set of data.
Focusing on the demand for talents in the artificial intelligence industry, colleges and universities are also exploring new training models.
On April 20, the School of Artificial Intelligence of Shanghai Jiao Tong University was established in Xuhui Campus, as a special zone college jointly established with Shanghai and the national platform of Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory.
Ding Kuiling, President of Shanghai Jiaotong University and Academician of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, pointed out in the report that in the new wave of artificial intelligence development, the School of Artificial Intelligence of Shanghai Jiaotong University will innovate the Scaling Law on the development path, and improve the "parameter quantity" by vigorously gathering talents and closely linking talents to carry out organized scientific research; By aggregating resources from all over the world, we can do a good job in computing power support and improve the "amount of computing".
On the same day, Shanghai Jiaotong University also signed strategic cooperation agreements with 9 key units in the field of artificial intelligence, including Huawei, iFLYTEK, SenseTime, Yuncong Technology, Yuntian Lifei, Biqian Technology, 4Paradigm, etc.
In addition to Shanghai Jiaotong University, the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences also established the School of Artificial Intelligence in 2017, which is the first new type of college in the field of artificial intelligence in mainland China to comprehensively carry out teaching and scientific research, and in 2019, Chinese Min University established the Hillhouse School of Artificial Intelligence.
As for the artificial intelligence major, a total of 470 colleges and universities have been opened since 2018, and it is also a popular major in the college entrance examination every year. According to the previously released "2022 College Entrance Examination Search Big Data", artificial intelligence has ranked first in the hot search list for college entrance examination majors for 3 consecutive years. Especially since the Ministry of Education has promoted the construction of new engineering courses, a total of 130 undergraduate colleges and universities have added artificial intelligence majors in 2021.
Yao Kai, director of the Global Science and Technology Talent Development Research Center of Fudan University, told Yicai that with the advent of the post-industrialization era and the digital intelligence era, strategic emerging industries such as artificial intelligence, big data, large-scale integrated circuits, and high-end equipment manufacturing continue to emerge.
So what is the key to cultivating AI talents in universities?
Zheng Qinghua, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and president of Tongji University, wrote an article in the Study Times earlier this year that the emergence of artificial intelligence is breaking down the high walls between disciplines. Under the new situation of rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, universities can no longer be led by the "baton" such as rankings, but should bravely enter the "no man's land" of science and technology frontier and the "deep water area" of system reform, and take the initiative to explore a new model of cross-integration of "artificial intelligence +" discipline construction.
In his view, in recent years, many colleges and universities have been approved to open artificial intelligence majors, and have established interdisciplinary doctoral programs in intelligent science and technology, artificial intelligence schools and research institutes. If the construction of "new engineering" and "new science" is to collide with artificial intelligence technology on the basis of the original disciplines, then the construction of artificial intelligence-related emerging disciplines is more focused on the development of artificial intelligence technology's own theories, methods, tools and systems. The discipline of artificial intelligence should cultivate "professional" talents with the ability of basic research and cross-application of artificial intelligence, and the artificial intelligence thinking of "all-in-one". The construction of such emerging disciplines must be based on the disciplinary characteristics and talent characteristics of artificial intelligence, focus on the research of cutting-edge scientific problems and core key common technologies in the field of artificial intelligence, and cultivate interdisdiscentric, complex, high-level and innovative high-end artificial intelligence talents.
Yao Kai also believes that in the long run, the development of the artificial intelligence industry and the cultivation of talents urgently need colleges and universities to actively exert efforts, such as vigorously promoting school-enterprise cooperation, focusing on the deep integration of scientific and technological innovation and industrial development. Through the cooperation of schools and enterprises, we can change the status quo that university talents lag behind the development of enterprises, and let enterprise technology empower university research and help the integration of industry, education and research to be implemented.
(At the request of the interviewee, Chen Yu is a pseudonym)
(This article is from Yicai)