<div id="readability-page-1">Chinese tech giants Xiaomi and Alibaba Group Holding have launched spring recruitment drives amid fierce competition for the talent driving the global artificial intelligence boom. The campaigns come as the smartphone and e-commerce giants, respectively, look to increasingly position themselves as AI-first firms, amid growing commercial pressures in their traditional businesses. In a Weibo post on Monday, Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun said the company’s global recruitment campaign would target top industry talent, fresh graduates and interns. Its official recruitment website listed more than 200 available positions, in cities that included Beijing, Shanghai and Nanjing. Meanwhile, Alibaba announced earlier this month that it would add seven new types of AI-related positions to its campus recruitment this year, including several in the field of agentic AI. AI-related positions account for more than 80 per cent of Alibaba’s open roles, up from around 60 per cent during fall recruitment last year, spanning 16 business units within the group including Alibaba Cloud and chip design unit T-Head. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.  Xiaomi has said it would spend up to 16 billion yuan (US$2.3 billion) in AI research and development and capital expenditure this year, as part of its 60 billion yuan AI spend over the next three years. The Beijing-based company reported shrinking profits in its latest earnings earlier this month, as rising memory chip costs dragged down smartphone shipments, the firm’s largest revenue contributor. More than 30 of its open positions were for Miclaw engineers, Xiaomi’s version of the open-source AI agent tool OpenClaw that has swept across China’s tech sector in recent weeks. New recruits are expected to work on resolving hardware constraints surrounding the tool, including device lag, overheating and throttling caused by “multiple AI agents making concurrent requests”. Meanwhile, 17 vacancies were for engineers to work on Xiaomi’s flagship foundational model family MiMo, while more than 60 positions covered Xiaomi’s hardware offerings including robots and autonomous vehicles. Xiaomi has notched up early successes with its MiMo foundational models, which have been well-received in the global developer community despite a late start for the company compared with domestic rivals.  Earlier this month, third-party benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis ranked Xiaomi’s latest closed-source MiMo-V2-Pro model as a leading Chinese model for overall capabilities. Heading Xiaomi’s model development efforts is Luo Fuli, a star researcher born in 1995 and poached from AI start-up DeepSeek last year. Lei said earlier this month that the MiMo team had an average age of 25. Competition over AI talent among tech companies globally has become closely watched due to the increasing importance of core technical breakthroughs for commercial success. Internal moves at Alibaba became a hot topic online following the departure earlier this month of Lin Junyang, technical lead for the Qwen team, and the arrival of former Google senior staff research scientist Zhou Hao. Another recent high-profile departure from a Chinese tech giant was Wang Yunhe, director of Huawei Technologies’ core model development team Noah’s Ark Lab, who left the tech giant after nine years, domestic media reported last week. Wang and Huawei did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday.</div>

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<p>Chinese tech giants Xiaomi and Alibaba are ramping up AI recruitment amid fierce competition for talent in the global AI boom. Xiaomi's CEO announced a global recruitment campaign targeting top talent and interns, with over 200 positions available. Alibaba is adding seven new AI-related roles, with over 80% of its open positions now in AI. Xiaomi plans to invest 16 billion yuan in AI this year, focusing on foundational models and hardware solutions. The competition for AI talent is intensifying, highlighted by recent high-profile departures and internal moves within major tech firms.</p>

Xiaomi, Alibaba ramp up AI recruitment amid global talent war