A recent Monday evening, several Chinese participants joined a livestream on Zhihu, a question / answer platform similar to Quora, and were welcomed by an instructor who said that her name was EVA. She promised to teach them the skills they needed to work in the artificial intelligence industry.
The two -hour EVA session covered subjects such as “Next Token Prediction” and “attention is everything you need”. She also showed a graph detailing the wage range of AI engineers at different levels: the best are paid more than 2 million yuan ($ 279,000) per year, almost 10 times median income Software developers in China. In a related WeChat group, participants, including software developers and a drone engineer, said they were eager to find jobs working on large language models.
“The AI has had an excellent opportunity for ordinary people to change our lives,” said Eva in her conference. “As long as you have good technical skills, you can find a job.” At the end of the trial session, she urged participants to pay 4,980 yuan ($ 695) for a 70 -hour course.
As a Chinese technological business, from Alibaba to Bytedance Race to recruit people who can build advanced AI models and develop new applicationsTechnology workers and computer students in the country turn to books, online courses, tutorials and consultations to acquire skills that will help launch a career in AI.
China has a of several billion dollars Online learning market. Education platforms and influencers have previously praised courses on delivery, electronic commerce and metavers, capitalizing on an appetite to understand new technologies and make them money. AI lessons have multiplied since the launch of Deepseek earlier this year.
Initially, these courses have taught people how to use AI tools such as Chatgpt and Midjourney, which generate images based on text prompts. More recent offers have consisted in building products powered by AI and securing well -paid jobs, with slogans like “become an engineer of AI models in 100 days” and “AI models: a historical opportunity that you should not miss”. They promise to teach everything, from the history of LLM to advanced techniques such as generation with recovery, which helps improve LLM results.
People may not buy luxury products, but they are ready to pay for these courses.
AI boom has generated jobs not only for elite researchers, but also for those working on small experimental applications, and AI trainers, Lin Zhang, associate professor at the University of New Hampshire who studies the digital economy of China, said Rest of the world.
“Regardless of its usefulness or not these courses, they deal with people's anxiety in the face of economic uncertainties,” she said. “People may not buy luxury products, but they are ready to pay for these courses.”
The rise of the AI and the launch of Deepseek have reconstructed China's technological industry of a dollars Billion, which has reached spreads in widespread And a meticulous examination in recent years in the midst of slower economic growth. Baidu search engines said earlier this year that 87% of its 3,000 summer courses would be linked to AI. Bytedance, the parent company of Tiktok, has a new “seededInitiative, promising in a recruitment ad to provide AI researchers with sufficient data and computing power.
China's need for qualified workers in AI will develop six times to reach 6 million by 2030, McKinsey estimated In 2025. A recent report on the Chinese employment platform Liepin showed that the number of people related to AI job openings increased by more than 36% in the first half of 2025.
Online courses also fill a gap in formal education. Although universities in China have rushed Add the AI majorsrecent graduates of computer programs told Rest of the world They generally do not obtain practical training in advanced LLM techniques. Even those enrolled in AI programs must often complement their independently education, they said. On Xiaohongshu social networks, users frequently exchange advice on the introduction by break -in in the AI industry, the sharing of the lists of books and video tutorials and the exchange of interview strategies.
Frankie Chen, a major in AI in a university in Tianjin, said that the prices of the automatic learning he had followed did not do much to prepare him to work with the LLM. To get an internship in AI, he spent two months reading books; Practice on Leetcode, a platform that helps users prepare for the coding of interviews; And the purchase of equipment from influencers on Zhishi Xingqiu, a platform for sharing knowledge similar to Patreon. Chen did not register on online courses, because a complete program cannot be offered online, he said Rest of the world.
Chen recently found an internship working on an AI customer service tool. With the internship on his CV, he plans to apply for full -time jobs in the best Chinese Internet companies.
“Traditional frontal and back-end engineers will be replaced by LLM,” he said. “I want to plan the future.”
On Xiaohongshu social networks, users exchange advice on the introduction into the AI industry, the sharing of books and video tutorials and interview strategies.
Chen is right to be careful about online AI lessons. There is little regulatory surveillance, and there are several complaints concerning their quality and their assertions. On the consumer complaint of consumers Heimao Tousu, former students asked for reimbursements, accusing certain providers of bad lessons and exaggerated promises of guaranteeing jobs. The didactics of the Guru Li Yizhou on the generative AI were withdrawn from the social media platforms WeChat and Douyin last year after the customers complained that they lacked substance and were filled with advertisements, according to the media.
Other students think they have no choice but to register. A computer graduate from the Shandong province paid 4,000 yuan ($ 557) for an IA engineering lesson online. During live sessions, the instructor introduced concepts such as AI agents and a generation with recovery, but students have not acquired any practical skills, he said Rest of the world.
“The courses were too superficial,” he said, asking not to be named because he feared that talking to the media affects his job prospects. He turned to other free online resources, which, according to him, were more useful and helped him to drop the LLM requests for job construction in a small Beijing company.
Technological companies are also joined by AI education thrust, with courses that promote their own AI and cloud services. Tencent cloud offers a course to Chinese universities on the deployment of LLM, using its own HUNYUAN model. NVIDIA, which sells fleas used to supply AI models to China, has both free and paid lesson On in -depth learning and AI agents.
There is no estimate on the number of people who have registered in online AI lessons, but on the Bilibili video sharing site, some tutorials for the adjustment and deployment of LLM have more than a million views.
Despite the increased interest, high -end AI jobs only go to Ph.D. graduate of prestigious universitiesor people with experience on well -known models, Berry Liu, founder of the technical head hunting company based in Shenzhen, Zzcareer, said Rest of the world. Self-taught developers can respond to job demand in specialized AI applications, she said, as AI tools become deeply integrated in all industries.
On recruitment sites in China, telecommunications, pharmaceutical companies and machines all have jobs related to AI models. The fear of late has also seized the veterans of technological workers, because AI improves in code writing.
A programmer in a main technological enterprise in Beijing, who asked for anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to the media, said Rest of the world Each department of his company was under pressure to integrate AI.
In his downtime, the 30-year-old reads books on AI agents and likes his skills by creating a chatbot to manage customer service requests for massage stores, he said. He plans to apply for positions focused on the LLM – and, as a parallel project, to create and sell AI tutorials to other developers.
“My own job is also in danger,” he said. “When the next license series occurs, you will have more options if you have learned (IA).”