Shanghai hosts one-third of AI talent pool nationwide

Shanghai is home to one-third of the artificial intelligence professionals nationwide, drawing firms and organizations to the city to tap the talent pool and potential AI development, a top city government official said today.

Besides the talent pool, Shanghai has an advanced capital market and a huge volume of tradable data, which account for half of the national level, Wu Qing, the city's vice mayor, said during a meeting with visitors from Massachusetts Institute of Technology and SenseTime, one of the leading AI firms in China.

Wu, however, didn’t mention the detailed figures of AI professionals the city hosts.

But China suffers from an AI talent shortfall of 5 million professionals which include 500,000 core engineers who master programming and related technologies, dajie.com, an online recruitment firm, has said previously.

SenseTime, which plans to invest 6 billion yuan (US$938 million) in Shanghai, signed cooperation agreements with state-owned giants Shanghai Lingang Group and Shanghai Inesa to develop AI. SenseTime will set up a headquarters for global research, intelligent car, smart chip and smart education in Shanghai, said Tang Xiao’ou, founder of SenseTime, who is also a professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong.