China’s AI talent race is starting in high school

Yang's son is 13, lives in Hangzhou, and has already won AI model-building competitions across China. He's got 136,000 followers on Xiaohongshu, where his dad posts his projects. And yet Yang, an ordinary parent with no background in AI, told Rest of World he has no idea how to guide him. "We don't know what he should be learning," he said. Right now the kid is mostly teaching himself.

That gap is exactly what a wave of Chinese companies is rushing to fill, and the motives aren't purely charitable. Tencent launched camps in June for students aged 13 to 18, running three to eight weeks and covering AI product management, robotics, and quantum computing. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming co-founded a nonprofit research center in October that takes just 30 students a year as full-time trainees in AI, math, and computer science, alongside broader summer programs; applicants submit transcripts and a parent statement on how they've supported the kid's learning. Geely went furthest, launching a program in March that recruits straight out of high school, guarantees a job and training in AI, new-energy vehicles, low-altitude aviation, and satellite tech, and pays graduate-level wages. Students pay 5,800 yuan a year in tuition, but Geely refunds it after each year completed.

The urgency traces back to numbers that genuinely alarm employers. McKinsey estimates China could be short 5 million AI workers by 2030, with universities covering only about a third of that demand. Zhaopin data from January through May found 3.08 AI vacancies for every qualified candidate, even as AI engineering roles grew 28.4% year over year — a ratio just below the 3.2 global average reported by ManpowerGroup for 2026.

Not every company is buying into the youth-hunt. MiniMax, whose workforce already skews young at an average age of 29 with more than 73% in R&D, says it has no plans to recruit from high schools or run teen internships. VP Yunan Zhang argues the industry moves too fast for old credentials to matter much anyway. "Academic degrees are not absolute standards," she said, adding that MiniMax is chasing raw intelligence and curiosity rather than age. What has changed, she says, is that university students who once couldn't get past HR at a major firm now get a real shot.

China isn't inventing this playbook alone. Google and Microsoft have run high-school programs in the US for years, and Palantir launched a fellowship last year aimed at putting high school graduates into full-time roles. Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said the company is more willing to hire people without bachelor's degrees, and the share of Google job postings requiring one fell from 93% in 2017 to 77% in 2022, per the Burning Glass Institute.

Chris Pei, who co-runs recruitment firm UFound in Beijing, says the real hiring decisions still happen mostly at the undergraduate or graduate level — the teen programs are about tracking someone's growth for years before making a call, and about the company looking generous with its investment along the way. For Yang, none of that resolves the more basic tension: whether to keep pushing his son toward competitions and public attention, or let him just be a kid who happens to be good at AI.