Pinduoduo ramps up investment in AI with job posts for LLM engineers as it eyes greater adoption

Budget shopping platform Pinduoduo, operated by PDD Holdings, is ramping up investment in artificial intelligence (AI) after posting job adverts for various positions, including algorithm engineers.

Pinduoduo is offering up to 60,000 yuan (US$8,451) per month for roles including large language model (LLM) developers and LLM referencing engineers based in its Shanghai headquarters, according to recruitment posts published by online talent service Boss Zhipin.

Candidates for the LLM referencing engineer role will be responsible for the research, development and optimisation of the company’s LLM reference engine. LLMs are the algorithms that underpin generative AI technology, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT chat bot.

The referencing engineers will also keep tabs on frontier technology progress in the sector, and support adoption of Pinduodu’s LLM and artificial intelligence generated content (AIGC) across the company’s businesses.

Pinduoduo did not immediately respond to a request for comment on whether it will launch its LLM publicly or how it intends to use it within the business.

Since ChatGPT launched a year ago, Chinese Big Tech firms including search engine giant Baidu and social media and gaming titan Tencent Holdings have raced to develop proprietary LLMs for use in their own operations and to serve enterprise clients.

Pinduoduo’s e-commerce rivals, including Beijing-based JD.com and Hangzhou-based Alibaba Group Holding, which owns the Post, have also launched their own LLMs.

JD.com launched ChatRhino in July at a corporate event in Beijing, and the company has showcased how the LLM can shorten the time it takes to develop a cross-team mobile campaign from weeks to minutes.

Alibaba’s cloud unit launched its Tongyi Qianwen LLM in April, offering it to clients and integrating the chatbot into hundreds of its internal applications, including e-commerce marketplace Taobao, Alibaba Cloud said at the time.

Pinduoduo’s official website shows that it started to hire for LLM-related roles in late September but its interest in the AI technology goes back several years.

In an interview with local media outlet Caijing in 2018, Pinduoduo founder and former chief executive Colin Huang Zheng, who studied computer science in China and the US with training on AI and data mining, talked about utilising machine learning to help select which products should be sold on the firm’s platform.

Current co-chief executive Chen Lei, who was the then-chief technology officer at Pinduoduo, also spoke at an industry event in 2019 about how a distributed AI system could more precisely match consumer desires with products to drive growth in the retail segment.