Alibaba, ByteDance Pay Chinese Pros $15-$74 to Train AI

Chinese architects, lawyers, software engineers and doctors are moonlighting as AI trainers for 100 to 500 yuan ($15 to $74) per task, feeding domain expertise into models built by Alibaba and ByteDance, Rest of World reports.

Alibaba's Siriser platform launched in January and is recruiting teachers, mechanical engineers and music composers. ByteDance's Xpert, launched in 2025, claims more than 50,000 experts, from writers to therapists. Independent platforms including TalentsAI and MeetChances have onboarded journalists, tax accountants, headhunters and lawyers.

"It is just like teaching a child," Cuicui, a Shenzhen-based architect in her 40s, told Rest of World. "Every task has to come from my actual work."

Liu, a Shenzhen AI trainer with a master's degree in law, put the calculus more bluntly: "If I don't pass my knowledge to AI, others will do that."

The backdrop is a job market that is not absorbing them elsewhere. Youth unemployment hit 17.9% in July, approaching a three-year high, after a record number of college graduates entered the workforce this summer. In June, China's National Data Administration threw its support behind building "high quality data sets" and encouraged graduates to take annotation work as flexible employment.

The reporting cites a projection that China's AI training data market will reach 7.8 billion yuan ($1.1 billion) in 2026, a 25% rise from 2025. Tiezhen Wang, a Sydney-based AI researcher and former head of the Asia-Pacific ecosystem at Hugging Face, framed the stakes: "Making models perform better at work will be a very strong differentiator in future AI competition."

This lands a day after our coverage of a New York Times report on China's record graduate cohort facing a labor market where AI is erasing entry-level roles.