High school 'genius classes,' which select 100,000 students annually, are becoming a supply network for AI talent.
In the race for generative AI, semiconductors and investment amounts tend to attract attention, but the financial newspaper
China's genius plan to win the AI race is already paying off
https://www.ft.com/content/68f60392-88bf-419c-96c7-c3d580ec9d97
Stacy Tang, a pharmaceutical company manager working in Beijing, says she received a call from an unknown landline number in November 2022 instructing her to send her 15-year-old son to a gifted high school qualification exam. The exam took place during a time of strict COVID-19 lockdowns and many school closures, but it was conducted in an unusual format, with test-takers solving university-level math problems for about an hour in a van constantly driving around the city.
While this might seem alarming to someone unfamiliar with the situation, Tang told the Financial Times that he took it as 'a ticket to the best educational resources' and sent his son there without hesitation. The destination of this ticket is the 'gift class' at top high schools across China. According to the Financial Times, the gifted classes are a framework for selecting talented students in subjects such as mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and information, and providing training to help them win international competitions. Each year, approximately 100,000 teenagers enter this science, mathematics, and information technology talent development route.
The Financial Times believes that this early selection process has served as a talent supply network for the fields of AI, robotics, and advanced manufacturing, citing examples of people who have graduated from this genius class include the founder of TikTok's parent company ByteDance , the core developer of TikTok's recommendation algorithm, the person who launched the food delivery app Meituan , and the brothers who launched Cambricon , a rival to NVIDIA.
The Financial Times explains that this system is also easy for companies to use: because results in international and domestic competitions serve as a benchmark for ability, companies can easily find candidates at a relatively early stage, making it easier to secure a continuous pool of talent to invest in research and development.
In the field of AI, developers at DeepSeek and Alibaba's Qwen , as well as Tencent 's new chief scientist, are also said to be geniuses, with the Financial Times stating that 'geniuses with experience are prominent at the heart of major development sites.'
The Financial Times cites the possibility of bypassing the nationally standardized ' gaokao ' (college entrance exam) as a strong incentive to enter this genius class. Between the ages of 16 and 18, gifted students are dropped from regular classes to focus on competitive subjects. By achieving success in competitive classes, they can secure a place at a top university like Tsinghua University or Peking University before graduating from high school.
However, this path isn't beneficial for everyone. Only about 3% of students achieve results that lead to direct admission each year, while the rest are forced to return to the GAQ route, according to the Financial Times. By the time they are returned, some students may only have about a year of high school left, and the burden of switching to preparing for the GAQ has led to parental frustration.
As a result, the Financial Times explains, curriculum adjustments have been made to accommodate the possibility of returning to the normal route, such as increasing the emphasis on English and Chinese literature, even in gifted classes.
However, the system will be tightened at the end of 2025, and only the top 10% of national competition winners will be eligible for direct admission to Tsinghua University or Peking University, making it even more difficult for those in the genius class to advance to top universities or research institutions.
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in Education, AI, Web Service, Posted by log1b_ok