Yang is immensely proud of his 13-year-old son. The middle-school student from Hangzhou has won artificial intelligence model-building competitions across China, and has 136,000 followers on Chinese social media platform XiaohongshuiXiaohongshuXiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book” in Chinese, is a lifestyle e-commerce and social media platform., where his father documents his projects.
Despite his son’s talent, Yang was unsure of how to nurture it in the fast-moving world of AI — one he had never experienced growing up.
“We’re just an ordinary family,” Yang told Rest of World, requesting to be identified only by his last name due to concerns over online attention surrounding his minor son. “Our biggest challenge is resources. We don’t know what he should be learning or the best way for him to learn it. Right now, he’s mostly teaching himself.”
Yang might soon find a solution to his challenges. Chinese companies are steadily expanding their talent pipeline from university graduates to undergraduates — and, increasingly, to teenagers.
The shift reflects a severe shortage of elite engineers, growing competition among AI companies, and a belief that exceptional talent needs to be identified long before it enters the workforce.
“AI talent has become both scarce and unusually scalable,” Tianchen Xu, a Beijing-based senior economist at research firm Economist Intelligence Unit, told Rest of World. “A younger engineer who has grown up with open-source models, coding agents, and fast experimentation may have lower adjustment costs and a longer expected runway inside the firm. In a market where AI scientists and algorithm roles are already commanding very high salaries, firms are trying to identify high-upside talent before the market fully prices them in.”
In June, TencentiTencentBest known for its super-app WeChat, Tencent is a Chinese technology conglomerate and a major player in the video gaming industry. launched a series of camps for students aged 13 to 18 years, offering mentorship and training in areas including AI product management, robotics, and quantum computing over three to eight weeks.
In October 2025, ByteDanceiByteDanceByteDance is a Chinese internet technology company that owns TikTok and Douyin, a Chinese version of TikTok with a successful e-commerce arm. founder Zhang Yiming co-founded a nonprofit research center targeting students aged 16 to 18. The program selects 30 students each year as full-time research trainees in AI, mathematics, and computer science, while also hosting summer camps for a broader group of participants. Applicants are asked to submit school transcripts, describe their experience in math and computer science, and include a statement from their parents outlining how they have supported their child’s learning.
