A 13-year-old in Hangzhou has already won national competitions and built an online following of more than 136,000 people, all while still figuring out algebra homework. His story is becoming less of an outlier and more of a preview for where China's tech industry is headed.
Companies that once waited patiently for university graduates to apply are now reaching backward through the pipeline, first to undergraduates, and increasingly to teenagers, hoping to identify rare talent before any competitor gets there first. The driving force is a projected shortage McKinsey estimates could leave China short by roughly 5 million AI workers by 2030, with open AI positions already outnumbering qualified candidates.
Tencent has responded with camps for students aged 13 to 18 covering topics from AI product management to quantum computing. ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming went further still, co-founding a research program that selects just 30 students annually as full-time trainees, effectively treating a handful of teenagers like junior researchers rather than interns.
Automaker Geely has taken perhaps the most structurally aggressive approach. Rather than waiting for college graduates, it now recruits directly out of high school, training students in AI and EV technology alongside their regular studies and guaranteeing them a job paying the same as a fresh graduate once training concludes.
Even companies not actively courting high schoolers are loosening traditional requirements. MiniMax, one of China's leading AI startups, says it has stopped treating a college degree as a hard requirement, prioritizing curiosity and raw ability instead. That shift isn't unique to China either; Google co-founder Sergey Brin has said his company is increasingly open to hiring candidates without a bachelor's degree.
Taken together, these moves suggest AI isn't just changing what jobs look like. It's changing who gets considered for them in the first place, with degrees, age, and traditional resumes all carrying less weight than raw skill.