The article "Food Delivery Riders, Trapped in the System" pointed out that food delivery platforms use algorithms to compress food delivery time, making the work of riders more and more difficult and even more dangerous. At the same time, news such as AI replacing human jobs and autonomous driving replacing millions of drivers continue to stimulate the current "optimization" environment.
So, does AI replace labor or assist human work? This became a key issue.
According to news on November 5, Titanium Media App learned that the "Research on the Potential Impact of AI Large Models on my country's Labor Market" recently jointly released by the National Development Research Institute of Peking University and Zhaopin Recruitment showed that among the AI-related occupations to be recruited in the first half of 2024, The number of natural language processing positions in large language models increased by 111% year-on-year, deep learning positions increased by 61%, robot algorithm positions increased by 76%, autonomous driving intelligent driving system engineers increased by 49%, and navigation algorithms increased by 47%.
It is worth noting that the report mentioned that in the first half of 2024, the average monthly salary for natural language processing positions will reach 24,007 yuan, and the monthly salary for deep learning positions will reach 26,279 yuan, with growth rates of 11% and 2% respectively over the same period in 2023. Ranked at the forefront of AI-related positions.
Obviously, with ChatGPT igniting the global generative AI entrepreneurial boom, AI technology is improving the productivity of human life on the one hand, and companies are increasing the recruitment and salary of AI-related talents. On the other hand, it is constantly replacing part of human routine work with "intelligence". Unemployment (replaced by AI) has become a haze in the minds of countless workers. People have discovered that AI has become more and more widely used in fields such as automated customer service, writing text, art design, and generating code.
Goldman Sachs has estimated that 300 million jobs worldwide are expected to be replaced by generative AI, including important positions such as lawyers and administrators.
A scholar in the field of AI told TMTpost App that China's talent market is currently in the midst of "structural adjustment." In order to "reduce costs and increase efficiency," many companies have begun to replace human work with machines, resulting in a short-term shortage of talent supply in the industry. In the long term, generative AI will have a profound impact on the talent market and society.
Li Qiang, executive vice president of Zhaopin Recruitment, told TMTpost App that the Internet is an industry that is at the forefront of technological development and is constantly innovating and changing. Therefore, it is faster to accept and apply large-model technologies and make faster adjustments to the recruitment of relevant positions. , this shows that companies and professionals are actively responding to the changes brought about by technology, and it is difficult to determine whether there will be new employment model changes. However, the jobs within customer service/operations, software/hardware R&D positions that are susceptible to the impact of large models are obviously increasing. reduce.
After learning to invest in “bet”
AI companies implement talent “bet”
From cutting-edge chips to U.S. dollar investments, competition between China and the United States in the field of technology will intensify. In the field of AI, AI talents who have mastered the development of pre-trained large model technology have become the object of competition among enterprises. As the technological competition between China and the United States intensifies, the battle for top talent resources has become the focus, and a strategy centered on talent The fight has already broken out.
Overseas, recently, Bubeck, vice president of Microsoft AI and leader of Phi small models, joined OpenAI; OpenAI CTO Mira Murati established an AI company in a short period of time after leaving her job, has raised more than US$100 million in venture capital, and invited many OpenAI core members Members have joined; SSI, an AI security company founded after the resignation of "Father of ChatGPT", co-founder of OpenAI, and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, raised US$1 billion in just 3 months after its establishment, and its valuation has exceeded 35 billion yuan.
Domestically, Zhou Chang, the technical director of Alibaba Tongyi Qianwen Large Model, was recently exposed to the news of his resignation; Zhou Xinyu, who once worked at Megvii Research Institute, chose to join Dark Side of the Moon; Qin Yujia founded Xuzhi in early 2024 after it was revealed that he resigned from Face Wall Intelligence Technology, and joined the Bytedance Model Research Institute a few months later.
Wang Lei (pseudonym), the former chief algorithm engineer of Didi Chuxing AI Labs, was revealed to have switched jobs from Beike to two "AI Six Little Tigers" companies in more than a year. He returned to Beike a while ago and only stayed at each company for a few years. months.
Relevant people told TMTpost App that before joining the above two large AI model companies, Wang Lei actually signed a "bet" agreement. The large model companies originally wanted him to lead the team to implement large model training and research and development work, but in the end he found He did not produce results, and the team used a lot of computing power and data transfer work, and finally resigned under friendly negotiation.
TMTpost Media App has learned that in order to maximize costs and R&D implementation, leading AI companies and Internet leaders have begun to sign "bet" agreements with AI talents to complete tasks within a certain period of time, otherwise they will automatically resign, or even have to Compensate for certain losses. Therefore, this “bet” has moved from a battle between investors and entrepreneurs to a competition between companies and AI talents.
The report also shows that first-tier cities and provincial capitals have a higher level of AI development, with Beijing, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Guangzhou and Hangzhou leading the country. Among them, in the first half of the year, the number of AI-related positions in Beijing accounted for 19.1%, the number of AI job seekers in terms of talent supply accounted for 14.3%, and the number of AI patents reached more than 23,000, ranking first in the country; while Hangzhou is an "AI" among non-first-tier cities. Model", in 2023, the number of patent applications related to artificial intelligence in Hangzhou exceeded 8,000, ranking fourth in the country.
Hu Jiayin, assistant professor at the National School of Development at Peking University, said in his interpretation that in the AI era, people who stand still will feel greater "threats". Software/hardware R&D and operation and maintenance/testing have two major impact indexes: Occupations, in the first half of this year, the proportion of job openings decreased compared with 2022, but the proportion of applicants increased by about 0.5 percentage points, showing an obvious lag. On the one hand, this is because it takes time for people to learn new skills; on the other hand, it may be due to lack of information and failure to obtain market demand changes in a timely manner.
Hu Jiayin emphasized that the lag in supply-side adjustment is a law of the market, but it also provides people with an opportunity to start first. While paying attention to changing trends in the job market, professionals must learn to use AI tools as early as possible and strengthen soft skills that cannot be replaced by large models, such as creativity, communication skills, organizational coordination skills, etc. Only by driving AI can they embrace AI.
Li Qiang told TMTpost App that the development of AI technology will cause insufficient talent supply in some industries in the short term. However, if we continue to embrace technology, AI and automation technology will improve work efficiency and push companies to move to more flexible employment models, such as project-based or contract-based employment models. System transformation will also create more high-quality jobs. When the Internet era came, everyone faced similar challenges. But in the end, new technologies brought about improvements in the efficiency of the entire society and created many related jobs in the Internet industry chain. For example, cross-border e-commerce has replaced most of the traditional trade. .
62.3% of employees are willing to work for more than 5 years
If employees want to stabilize the company, they must "survive"
Currently, the entire primary and secondary capital markets are in a downward cycle with slow recovery, and the general environmental trend is that many employees want more stable jobs.
On November 5, Zhaopin Recruitment released a research report on workplace employment relations, the "2024 China's Best Employers National TOP100 Preliminary Report", which showed that among the companies shortlisted for the top 100 employers in the country in 2024, 62.3% of employees are willing to work in the company. Those who have worked for more than 5 years are 12 percentage points higher than companies that were not shortlisted, and an increase of nearly 18 percentage points from the previous year. This trend reflects the increasing demand for job stability and security among employees in the new workplace, and further proves the positive impact of excellent companies (employers) on employee loyalty.
Taking the AI industry as an example, many companies still need workplace “veterans” with more than three years of work experience.
The report shows that among the current recruitment of AI-related positions, about 34% of natural language processing and deep learning positions require 3-5 years of experience, and about 14% require more than 5 years of experience. Large model-related positions involve multiple aspects of work such as programming, modeling, and algorithm optimization. The professional and technical threshold is relatively high. Therefore, the job requires high academic qualifications and talents need to have relatively rich practical experience, making the job experience requirements higher. .
Obviously, companies need skilled technical talents, and employees in the workplace also want more stable jobs. But what is more noteworthy is that companies need to "survive" in the market. This is also an important reason why large companies continue to optimize employees and adjust business directions. .
As an AI company in the field of autonomous driving, Zhou Guang, founder and CEO of Yuanrong Qixing, admitted to TMTpost App on November 5 that many Chinese companies are now competing for autonomous driving capabilities. In the final analysis, it is still a competition between AI technologies. "I think the future will be particularly cruel. Today, there are actually 20-30 companies involved, all of which are free of charge. There will be a lot of competition, whether it is the threshold of talent, or the threshold of the window period. I don't think this is very important. It may become a blue ocean, and not many companies can survive.”
Today, accelerating AI and digitalization has become an important development trend for enterprises.
According to the Zhaopin Recruitment report, among the companies shortlisted for the top 100 employers in the country in 2024, 70% of the top 100 employers have independently set up information technology departments, an increase of 9 percentage points compared with 2023. It is reported that the shortlisted companies for this year's 2024 China's Best Employer of the Year·Top 100 National Employers include 360 Group, TCL Group, Smith, Northern Huachuang, BYD, Bosch China, Bank of Communications, Lenovo Group, Ant Group, SenseTime Technology, and Meituan , Ningde Times, etc.
Looking to the future, Li Qiang emphasized that many employees are now paying attention to the company's development prospects, working atmosphere and fair employment principles, and of course, their personal sense of stability and security in the workplace. Therefore, in the future, employers need to provide material incentives that go beyond traditional ones, pay more attention to creating a healthy corporate culture, provide career development opportunities, and establish a more fair and transparent employment mechanism to promote the creation of a new quality workplace.