According to the Financial Times, Chinese tech giants have begun to open offices in Silicon Valley en masse in order to hire the artificial intelligence specialists they need directly in the United States. In recent months, Alibaba, ByteDance and Meituan have been expanding their American offices, the publication’s sources note.
Image source: ByteDance
This comes amid increasing measures to ban the export to China of technologies and components that will accelerate the development of artificial intelligence systems. Formally, having an office in the United States allows Chinese companies to create data processing centers there and purchase the most advanced computing accelerators for them. The Commerce Department has only proposed forcing cloud service providers to identify users by geographic origin in order to control Chinese developers’ access to American computing power.
According to reports, China’s Alibaba has already tried to hire specialists with experience from OpenAI and other US tech giants to develop its own artificial intelligence systems. The Chinese company recruits specialists through its center in California. The pages of the social network LinkedIn have relevant vacancies for specialists living in the United States. New staff should focus on improving Accio’s search engine for e-commerce systems.
Alibaba also allegedly tried to attract American talent to work for its benefit by inviting them to join the California-based startup. One former OpenAI developer admitted that he and his colleagues are literally bombarded with email messages from Chinese companies Meituan and Alibaba, urging them to take a closer look at their vacancies. Meituan has been growing its team in California for months, wary of falling behind competitors in the AI space. Its employees spend part of their time in the United States, but also manage to work in China.
The Chinese company ByteDance, which created TikTok, has the most developed representative office in California. She has several teams of specialists in the USA working on different projects. Smaller Chinese AI startups are also trying to secure valuable talent in the United States. California and Baidu have a representative team of developers in this area, some of them specializing in autopilot and speech recognition technologies. In 2017, the American representative office of Baidu had several hundred employees on its staff. Subsequently, the worsening political situation and internal conflict in Baidu forced them to leave the local division of the company.