Zhipu’s process works like this: To join their model team, you must start as an intern. Most interns are current computer science students from Tsinghua University, and nearly all need a recommendation from their advisor to Tang Jie. Under the guise of an internship, it’s essentially exploiting high-quality, low-cost labor. You’re paid wages comparable to daily laborers in Majuqiao, while benefiting from top-tier intelligence and research capabilities. It’s now extremely difficult for recent graduates to break into large language model development. Leading foundation model companies have largely stopped hiring. Pre-training roles are almost nonexistent; there’s still limited opportunity in post-training.