On a recent Monday evening, several Chinese participants joined Zhihu's livestream, a Q&A platform similar to Quora, and were greeted by an instructor who said her name was Eva. She has promised to teach them the skills they need to work in the artificial intelligence industry.
The two-hour EVA session covers topics such as “Next token prediction” and “Caution is required.” She also provided a chart detailing the pay ranges for AI engineers at different levels. The best is paid over 2 million yuan ($279,000) a year, nearly 10 times the median median for Chinese software developers. In the related WeChat group, participants, including software developers and drone engineers, said they were keen to find jobs working in large language models.
“AI has presented a great opportunity for ordinary people to change our lives,” Eva said in the lecture. “As long as you have excellent technical skills, you can get a job.” At the end of the trial session, she urged participants to pay 4,980 yuan ($695) for a 70-hour course.
To recruit people from Alibaba to build cutting-edge AI models and develop new applications, domestic tech workers and computer science students are turning to books, online classes, tutorials and consultations to acquire skills that they think will help you begin your AI career.
China has a multi-billion dollar online learning market. Educational platforms and influencers have previously promoted courses on live streaming, e-commerce and metaverse, leveraging their desire to understand new technologies and make money from them. The AI class has become mushrooms since Deepseek was launched earlier this year.
Initially, these courses taught people how to use AI tools such as ChatGpt and Midjourney, which generate images based on text prompts. More recent products are building AI-powered products and protecting slogans such as “Become an AI model engineer in 100 days” and “AI Model: Historical opportunities not to overlook.” They promise to teach everything from the history of LLMS to advanced techniques such as searched generation that can help improve LLM output.
People may not buy luxury items, but they are willing to pay for these classes.
The AI boom is creating jobs not only for elite researchers, but also for those working on small and medium-sized experimental applications and AI trainers. The rest of the world.
“No matter how useful these courses may be, they deal with people's fears about economic uncertainty,” she said. “People may not be buying luxury items, but they are happy to pay for these classes.”
The rise of AI and the launch of Deepseek have replicated China's trillion dollar technological industry. This has addressed widespread layoffs and government scrutiny amid slow economic growth in recent years. Search engine giant Baidu said earlier this year that 87% of 3,000 summer internships are AI-related. Bytedance, the parent company of Tiktok, has a new “top seed” initiative that promises to provide enough data and computing power to AI researchers with recruitment ads.
China's need for AI-skilled workers will be six times higher by 2030 until it reaches 6 million by 2030, as McKinsey estimated. A recent report by Chinese employment platform Liepin showed that the number of AI-related job openings rose by more than 36% in the first half of 2025.
Online courses also fill the gap in formal education. Chinese universities were in a hurry to add AI majors, but according to a recent graduate of the Computer Science Program The rest of the world Usually, you don't receive practical training with cutting-edge LLM techniques. Even those enrolled in AI programs often need to independently complement their education, they said. On social network Xiaohongshu, users frequently exchange advice on intrusion into the AI industry, sharing book lists and video tutorials, and exchanging interview strategies.
Frankie Chen, an AI major at a university in Tianjin, said the machine learning course he took was hardly done to prepare him to work with LLMS. He spent two months reading books to land an internship with AI. Practice with LeetCode, a platform that helps users prepare for interview coding. Purchased materials from influencers of Zhishi Xingqiu, a knowledge sharing platform similar to Patreon. Chen did not sign up for the online course. Because a comprehensive curriculum cannot be provided online, The rest of the world.
Chen recently found an internship working on AI customer service tools. A resume internship will allow him to apply for a full-time job at a top Chinese internet company.
“Traditional front-end and back-end engineers will be replaced by LLMS,” he said. “I want to plan for the future.”
On social network Xiaohongshu, users exchange advice on intrusion into the AI industry, sharing book lists and video tutorials, and interview strategies.
Chen is right to be careful about online AI courses. There is little regulatory oversight and there are some complaints about their quality and their claims. Heimao Tousu, a consumer complaint platform, blames exaggerated promises to request a refund and ensure poor guidance and employment for some providers. A self-style AI Guru Li Yizhou tutorial was removed from social media platforms last year from social media platforms Wechat and Douyin after customers complained that the customer was filled with ads with substance, according to media reports.
Other students believe they have no choice but to sign up. One computer science alumni from Shandong state paid 4,000 yuan ($557) for a two-month AI engineering course online. During the live session, instructors introduced concepts such as AI agents and generations in search, but students were not acquiring practical skills, he said. The rest of the world.
“The class was too superficial,” he said. He asked not to name him because he was worried that talking to the media might hurt his job prospects. He turned to other free online resources, but he said it was more convenient and helped raise the job of building LLM applications in a small Beijing company.
The high-tech company is also taking part in AI Education Push, featuring its own AI tools and courses that promote cloud services. Tencent Cloud offers courses to Chinese universities on LLM deployments using its own Hunyuan model. Nvidia, which sells chips used to power Chinese AI models, has both free and paid courses on deep learning and AI agents.
There is no estimate of how many people signed up for AI courses online, but on video sharing site Bilibili, the LLM tweak and deployment tutorial has over 1 million views.
Despite growing interest, the highest wage AI jobs go to doctoral degrees only. Berry Liu, founder of Zzcareer, a tech head hunting company based in Shenzhen, said that people with famous university alumni or famous modeling experience. The rest of the world. Self-taught developers can meet the demand for employment in specialized AI applications as AI tools become more deeply integrated across the industry, she said.
On Chinese recruitment sites, telecommunications, pharmaceutical companies and machinery companies all have employment related to AI models. As AI became better at writing code, the fear of falling behind has also grabbed veteran tech workers.
One programmer from Beijing's leading tech company said he requested anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to the media. The rest of the world All departments of his company were under pressure to incorporate AI.
In downtime, the 30-year-old hones his skills by reading books about AI agents and building chatbots to handle customer service inquiries from massage shops. He will apply for an LLM-centric position and will create and sell AI tutorials to other developers as a side project.
“My own work is at risk too,” he said. “When the next round of layoffs occur, there are more options if you are learning [AI]. ”
