Robin Li, co-founder and CEO of Chinese tech giant Baidu Inc, says Baidu will scale up efforts to cultivate an additional 10 million artificial intelligence experts over the next five years during Baidu Create 2025 in Wuhan, Hubei province, on April 25. [Photo/China Daily]

Tech giant to open 21,000 AI internship positions over the next three years

Chinese tech heavyweight Baidu Inc will scale up efforts to cultivate an additional 10 million artificial intelligence experts over the next five years to benefit society and create more employment opportunities, as it aims to create a well-rounded tech labor force and empower AI growth.

In a significant move to nurture future tech talent, Baidu announced that it will offer 21,000 internship positions for outstanding campus candidates over the next three years, and continue to strengthen the training of interns to further improve the intern-to-full-time employee conversion rate.

The initiative underscores the company's commitment to fostering young professionals and enhancing its internship program's quality and impact. By opening up these internship positions, Baidu hopes to provide hands-on experience and career growth opportunities for students across various disciplines.

In March, Baidu took an active step by offering more than 3,000 summer internship positions to students, with 87 percent of these positions centered around AI-related fields, including large language models, machine learning and autonomous driving. It will allow interns to participate in technological innovation as well as the research and development of core products.

This move ensures that interns not only gain valuable experience, but also have a clear pathway of long-term career opportunities within the company.

Baidu will also start its management trainee program and AIDU initiative this year, aiming to recruit top campus talent in the AI field, and cultivate future leaders in the AI era.

At present, dozens of outstanding management trainees are deeply involved in the company's core business and innovative development of AI, and over 100 doctoral degree holders have participated in the innovation research in fields such as robotics, autonomous driving, deep learning and large models.

Creating jobs and maintaining stable employment are government priorities amid a complicated international environment, with 13 million urban jobs needing to be created each year on average.

Baidu's campus recruitment for 2026 will kick off soon. In addition to campus recruitment, it is actively recruiting talent from society.

Looking ahead, the company will offer new vocational skills training to practitioners in traditional industries, and spare no effort to help them expand their employment paths. Over the next five years, it plans to cultivate 5 million experts engaged in large language models and 1 million autonomous driving talent from over 700 universities and research institutions nationwide.

The company is leveraging AI to empower employment. Lu Jian, head of Baidu's corporate social responsibility department, said it has collaborated with local labor unions to launch a learning platform for workers to master new skills nationwide, as well as stepped up the push to help people with disabilities find jobs.

The learning platform offers a wealth of courses taught by industry experts from various fields of AI. It is now available in Wuhan, Hubei province; Shenzhen, Guangzhou and Dongguan, Guangdong province; and Beijing, promoting the transformation of society toward AI.

Baidu's intelligent coding assistants are able to help visually impaired programmers develop software independently, opening up more job opportunities for them.

Jiang Han, a senior analyst at market consultancy Pangoal, said Chinese tech companies have played a vital role in expanding employment and bolstering technological innovation, especially in AI, which will be conducive to enhancing production efficiency and bolstering industrial upgrading, thus driving economic growth.

Along with the emergence of new business models and evolving consumption patterns, new types of occupations related to AI have kept emerging in China and have become key sources of job creation, Jiang said, adding that these companies should seize the opportunities presented by a new round of scientific and technological revolution and strengthen talent cultivation.

They should strive harder to equip the next generation of tech leaders with the skills and experience needed to drive innovation in rapidly evolving AI field, he added.