By Saritha Rai, Annabelle Droulers and Lauren Faith Lau | Bloomberg
Graduates from top US schools including Harvard University and Stanford University are flooding an up-and-coming Chinese AI startup with resumes after DeepSeek’s debut earlier this year helped elevate the profiles of fellow emerging technology builders in China.
That’s a sea change from years past, when it was challenging to hire engineers even from Chinese universities, said Victor Huang, co-founder and chairman of Manycore Tech Inc.
The fortune of the startup took a turn for the better after it was labeled as one of the “Six Dragons” of the eastern Chinese city of Hangzhou together with DeepSeek, whose lower cost AI model stunned the global AI industry in January, and Manycore has found it easier to attract candidates since, according to Huang.
“It’s totally changed” in the past two months, Huang told Bloomberg Television. “Many top talents from likes of Tsinghua University, Zhejiang University, Beijing University, even from Stanford, Harvard, they send resumes to us, and some of them already joined us.”
Huang’s spatial software startup, which helps users design interior space, is keen to grow its global presence, despite geopolitical tensions presenting difficulties to Chinese companies marketing products abroad.
But a shortage of global AI talent is becoming a bottleneck as industries and enterprises speed up adoption of artificial intelligence. Demand is outstripping supply in areas like machine learning and robotics.
The company, which has filed for a Hong Kong initial public offering, plans to add nearly 100 engineers who specialize in the latest AI technologies to keep pace with rapid advances, Huang said.
