Tencent Raids ByteDance AI Talent with Double-Salary Offers

Tencent is aggressively recruiting key artificial intelligence researchers from ByteDance, offering salaries up to double their current compensation, as competition for AI dominance intensifies among China's tech giants.

The company, which dominated the mobile era with its messaging service WeChat, has entered the AI talent war in earnest, reshuffling the competitive landscape among Chinese big tech companies, according to industry analysts.

Tencent has offered ByteDance AI researchers up to twice their existing salaries over recent months and has successfully poached some of them, The Information reported Sunday. The company has also reportedly offered fresh PhD graduates compensation packages more than 50% above the industry average.

The aggressive hiring push reflects Tencent's sense of urgency after falling behind in the AI model race, analysts said. While Alibaba and ByteDance have built presence in large language models and multimodal AI, Tencent's proprietary AI model Hunyuan has had limited market impact. ByteDance's AI chatbot Doubao leads the Chinese market with approximately 170 million monthly active users.

When Chinese startup DeepSeek's AI model gained attention earlier this year, Tencent quickly integrated it into WeChat and its own chatbot service. While user numbers surged, the move also exposed Tencent's lack of a competitive in-house model.

Tencent has since pursued organizational restructuring and talent acquisition, recognizing that strengthening its own AI research capabilities is essential for long-term competitiveness. In April, the company underwent a major reorganization, establishing dedicated units for large language models and multimodal models while consolidating its data and machine learning divisions. Last September, Tencent hired Yao Shunyu, a former OpenAI researcher, to lead AI research restructuring and recruitment efforts. More recently, the company has reduced the roles of some existing managers who lack research experience as it shifts toward a research-focused organization.

Amid these changes, Tencent recently unveiled its new foundation model Hunyuan 2.0, highlighting performance improvements. "No model has a decisive lead in China's AI market," Tencent President Martin Lau said at last month's earnings call. "We will continue to expand our research talent recruitment."