A new cohort of high-net-worth individuals has emerged.

"Sir, the times have changed."

The most profitable industry in China always seems to cycle every decade, and now it is AI's turn completely.

Graduates riding the trend of this era are better positioned than any previous cohort. Following the tide of the times, a group of fresh graduates have received offers with annual salaries of millions of yuan from leading AI giants, and they share highly similar characteristics:

This generation that stepped into society with the rise of AI mostly graduated from top universities, and some have already gained capital gains in the early stage of their career through equity incentives. Moreover, with high academic qualifications, they also have high-quality alumni networks and good credit records.

Perhaps when the time comes, they will start their businesses along the trend and build an AI company with a valuation of over 10 billion yuan.

Obviously, they are the latest group of high-net-worth individuals under the industrial transformation. Some people have already set their sights on their consumption potential, and begun to figure out how to seize the AI dividend from them in another sense.

Step out of campus, with annual salaries often reaching millions

In the past, the wealth narrative of traditional high-net-worth individuals usually revolved around industrial accumulation, monetization through entrepreneurship, or intergenerational transfer of parental assets.

But this group of high-net-worth individuals is different. They are not people with a large amount of disposable wealth in the traditional sense, but a group of young people who have earned the highest salaries in the current AI boom relying on their technology and intelligence.

"Now in the market, for fresh PhD graduates from top universities, the average ones get annual compensation packages of 2 million to 3 million yuan and above, the more outstanding ones get 5 million to 6 million yuan and above, and the top talents can get 8 million to 9 million yuan and above." A headhunter revealed that he came across a fresh master's graduate majoring in large model research from a 985 university, who received an offer of 6 million yuan annual salary from Xiaohongshu this year.

Looking through the AI talent recruitment plans for graduates of major tech companies, a salary of millions of yuan is almost the standard configuration.

Even some talents are not even adults yet. Recently, Deedy Das, an investor from Menlo Ventures, shared on social platforms that a 17-year-old teenager has received 5 job offers from top cutting-edge AI labs in San Francisco, all with a salary of more than about 1 million US dollars. Even he couldn't help but sigh: Traditional education is dead, and today's children are born different.

Young, smart, talents from leading tech companies, and with a pure social circle — this is the profile of the new high-net-worth group in the AI era.

In this profile, there are many iconic super new rich people. Leading companies at home and abroad all have AI geniuses, such as Chinese AI researcher Yu Jiahui, Meta's chief AI officer Alexandr Wang, Tencent's chief AI scientist Yao Shunyu, the head of Xiaomi's large model team Luo Fuli, Google's Yao Shunyu, and ByteDance's Guo Daya, etc. They are all post-1995s or post-1990s, some have already obtained hundreds of millions of yuan in salary options, and some have already secured the top AI position in large tech companies.

Of course, their wealth potential is far more than just a sky-high salary.

Looking at the post-2000s entrepreneurial circle alone, 25-year-old Hong Letong founded the AI company Axiom, whose post-investment valuation has reached as high as 1.6 billion US dollars; tech genius Noah Shinn, born in 2003, founded Instinct, whose valuation has reached an astonishing 10 billion US dollars; Chen Tianrun, a post-2000s PhD student from Zhejiang University, owns Moxin Technology, an AI enterprise with a valuation of nearly 10 billion yuan; Chen Yuanpei, a post-2000s entrepreneur with backgrounds from Peking University and Stanford, has raised 2 billion yuan in financing for his startup in just over a year.

Young AI entrepreneurs are achieving class leap with the help of this trend — Forbes data shows that the number of young entrepreneurs under 30 years old with a net worth of more than 1 billion US dollars worldwide has reached a record 35. Almost all of these 35 people are deeply engaged in the AI track.

A Microcosm, The New Dating Service in Silicon Valley

"Looking for AI-oriented husbands graduated from Tsinghua University and Peking University online." Some people have already set their sights on this new group of high-net-worth individuals.

In Silicon Valley where the AI war is in full swing, after Anthropic and OpenAI go public one after another, those young top AI talents will achieve continuous asset appreciation through equity mergers and acquisitions and super IPOs, and become the protagonists in the new round of Silicon Valley wealth landscape.

Around these high-potential groups, dating agencies in Silicon Valley are also getting busy.

It is reported that employees of leading AI companies such as Perplexity, Anthropic, and NVIDIA have become the new customer group of Silicon Valley dating agencies. The basic fee for their matchmaking services starts at 75,000 US dollars, and the top VIP service fee can exceed 500,000 US dollars at most.

The housing price in the Bay Area, which is closely related to the prosperity of the technology industry, can more intuitively reflect the consumption power of this group.

Redfin data shows that housing prices in San Francisco are growing at the fastest rate in nearly a decade, with the median house price reaching 1.7 million US dollars. In contrast, according to data from the National Association of Realtors, the median national house price in the United States in June was 440,600 US dollars. The underlying reason behind this is exactly the enthusiastic bidding from the newly rich in the AI circle.

"The end of AI wealth creation is real estate", this perception has also emerged in China.

From Hangzhou, where the six leading AI startups were born, to Nanshan in Shenzhen where the new rich gather, and then to the Binjiang industrial belt in Shanghai, fields including AI, chips, and embodied intelligence are mass-producing young high-net-worth groups, who are gradually taking over and becoming the main buyers in the luxury housing market.

The financial industry, which has fierce competition for high-net-worth individuals, has also set its sights on top researchers in technology enterprises. Reports show that the "scientist customer group" has become the key target for private banks to compete for. Institutions such as Industrial and Commercial Bank of China and China CITIC Bank have built exclusive service systems around tech entrepreneurs and scientific researchers, and improved their comprehensive service capabilities through linkage between public and private sectors, equity services and other measures.

More new service formats are in the making. As someone joked: How can ordinary people make money with AI? The answer might be to make money from those who can make money with AI.

Grasp the era opportunities that belong to you

The "Cycle Guru" has a famous saying, "Personal wealth depends on the Kondratieff Wave". Maybe when we look back many years later, we are currently standing at the node of a new round of Kondratieff Wave opportunities.

In the past 40 years, the underlying logic of China's wealth has gone through several clear iterations —

In the 1980s, people made fortunes by courage;

In the 1990s, the gate of the era opened to land and real estate;

After the new century, the wave of WTO pushed Chinese manufacturing to the whole world;

Then in 2010, the rapid development of consumption and mobile internet gave birth to a number of today's internet giants.

Every round of iteration is inseparable from the re-pricing of social production factors, and talents who fit the times have once stood at the peak.

The current AI wealth creation window is no exception.

The logic behind the highest-paying foundational model positions in the current AI market is not difficult to understand: large tech companies with huge cash flow are all scrambling for the first-mover advantage in AI, and expensive computing power requires effective research and engineering capabilities. Therefore, within the tight time window, foundational model teams have the privilege of high salaries.

It is conceivable that when the supply of large model talents reaches balance and the industry development hits the ceiling, how will the profile of talents that meet the needs of productivity development in the next round change?

The wheel of history rolls forward, and each generation has its own tide and high ground. AI brings a very small number of geniuses to the height they are destined to reach, and also makes many people find that the ladder they are about to climb has changed direction before they even reach their original starting point.

Each generation of people has their own era opportunities.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "Investment" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Feng Yuchen, and authorized for release by 36Kr.