Maimai CEO Predicts Tech Companies Will Exclusively Hire AI Talent Next Year
Lin Fan, CEO of Chinese career platform Maimai, reported a 7.9-fold surge in AI job listings on the platform this year, with up to 40% of open positions now related to AI. He predicted that tech companies will exclusively hire candidates with AI capabilities by next year as AI coding agents automate most white-collar tasks. The commentary highlights how rapid advancements in generative AI are accelerating labor market shifts, creating extreme demand for specialized AI researchers while raising expectations for general tech workers. It reflects an aggressive pivot across tech giants to restructure their workforce around AI productivity tools. According to Lin Fan, fresh graduates specializing in foundation model fields such as pre-training, post-training, and inference optimization can command annual salaries reaching millions to tens of millions of yuan. Major tech firms including Ant Group, ByteDance, JD.com, and Xiaomi are already slanting their latest campus hiring initiatives heavily toward AI roles and AI-assisted interviews.
## BACKGROUND
Developing large language models involves pre-training on massive text datasets followed by post-training to align model behaviors with human instructions and enhance reasoning capabilities. Inference optimization focuses on improving computational efficiency to execute trained models faster and at lower costs. Meanwhile, coding agents are autonomous AI systems designed to handle software tasks such as writing, debugging, and refactoring code without continuous manual oversight.