{"text":[[{"start":8.6,"text":"Chinese AI group DeepSeek is planning to double the size of many of its core teams, joining an intensifying talent war as it seeks to commercialise its frontier research."}],[{"start":19.7,"text":"The company said on Friday it had launched a recruitment drive to “expand every department” and that “many teams are expected to double in size”."}],[{"start":27.85,"text":"The advertised roles suggest the group is broadening beyond frontier model research into product development as it prepares to take on outside investment for the first time."}],[{"start":38.2,"text":"DeepSeek emerged as China’s artificial intelligence darling last year after the release of its open-source R1 reasoning model, which demonstrated performance comparable to leading western systems but was trained using more efficient methods."}],[{"start":52.2,"text":"Competition among Chinese AI groups has intensified in recent months, with rivals including Zhipu AI and Moonshot AI releasing improved open-source models that have been rapidly adopted by developers."}],[{"start":64.7,"text":"DeepSeek’s consumer chatbot has ceded ground to ByteDance’s Doubao in China, as users complained of slow response times, service outages and hallucinations."}],[{"start":75.65,"text":"The recruitment drive reflects founder Liang Wenfeng’s ambition to build DeepSeek into a broader AI company rather than a pure research lab. Liang has also argued for recruiting young engineers rather than established researchers."}],[{"start":89.55000000000001,"text":"Among the openings are AI product managers, product operations specialists and data product managers with expertise in sectors including law, medicine and languages, suggesting the company intends to develop more industry-specific products."}],[{"start":104.25000000000001,"text":"The company is also recruiting extensively for infrastructure engineering, including specialists in AI computing clusters, distributed storage, networking and training frameworks. The move indicates continued investment in large-scale model training and inference — the process through which chatbots generate responses."}],[{"start":125.30000000000001,"text":"DeepSeek has previously recruited for data centre positions in Inner Mongolia, a region of northern China where a network of AI data centres is being built, taking advantage of its low electricity costs."}],[{"start":137.15,"text":"Data engineers feature prominently among the openings, underscoring the growing importance of high-quality training data for AI models. Chinese companies are increasingly competing on model efficiency and reasoning ability rather than simply scaling computing power."}],[{"start":153.1,"text":"DeepSeek has also expanded its work on AI infrastructure in partnership with Huawei, helping optimise models to run on the Chinese company’s Ascend AI chips as Beijing pushes to reduce reliance on Nvidia hardware."}],[{"start":166.15,"text":"This year, DeepSeek released an Ascend-optimised version of its V4 model, although adapting frontier models to domestic chips has posed significant engineering challenges."}],[{"start":177.05,"text":"The hiring push comes as DeepSeek pursues outside funding for the first time. People familiar with the fundraising have said it is in part motivated by China’s fierce AI talent war, in which DeepSeek’s staff have been poached by larger rivals including Xiaomi and ByteDance."}],[{"start":202.85000000000002,"text":""}]],"url":"https://audio.ftcn.net.cn/album/a_1782485088_8275.mp3"}