[Major Tech Companies See Salary Inversion for AI Talent: Top Fresh Graduates Earning Up to 5 Million RMB Annually, While Senior Employees with Higher Ranks Earn Less] Beating AI News, Lei Feng Network reports that interviews with multiple headhunters reveal that domestic internet giants are tightening hiring quotas but are still willing to break salary caps for top AI talent. Headhunters disclosed that this year, some outstanding fresh graduates specializing in foundational models have reached annual compensation packages of 2 million RMB. Top-tier offers from ByteDance's Seed and Xiaohongshu have even reached 4 to 5 million RMB, while Baidu's offers range between 2 to 3 million RMB. The competition for high salaries is exacerbating the "salary inversion" within major tech companies. An industry insider revealed that some employees working on foundational models, despite holding lower ranks, are earning more than their higher-ranked colleagues. Similar issues have been observed as early as 2017. A senior engineer recalled that back then, a fresh graduate who joined a year later and held a lower rank earned 10,000 RMB more per month than him. In a team of over 30 people, turnover once reached about 10% per month. However, the high salaries are not benefiting all AI professionals. Headhunters noted that application-side roles in major companies are shrinking, while foundational model teams still lack individuals capable of training large-scale models. Coding agents, model evaluation, pre-training data, and agent infrastructure have become new focal points for talent acquisition. DeepSeek has recently been expanding its hiring for backend developers and agent infrastructure engineers. In contrast, the demand for roles in areas like AI search has declined. The bar for this hiring wave is getting increasingly higher. Companies are not only looking at academic credentials and publications but also whether candidates have hands-on experience training large-scale models in leading teams. For truly scarce talent, salaries and responsibilities can be negotiated individually; however, ordinary AI job seekers are facing increasingly fierce competition. [Original Article Link]