Physix FrontierPhysix Frontier · News Briefing Card (TMTPost · Oct 24, 2026)
DeepSeek vs Kimi hiring gap driven by compute
KEY FACTS
- DeepSeek's hiring favors winners of ACM, ICPC and similar competition medals, leaning toward young undergraduates.
- Kimi's hiring emphasizes hands-on experience, testing candidates on model cheating detection and large-scale experimentation ability.
- DeepSeek has more abundant compute than Kimi, allowing new hires to produce no results in their first two or three months.
- Kimi faces a compute shortage, requiring employees to quickly convert limited compute into model improvements.
- Neither company values traditional big-tech experience, believing old paradigms can become baggage.
PHYSIX OBSERVATION
The compute gap is directly shaping AI companies' talent strategies: those with abundant compute dare to raise geniuses and bet on the future, while those short on compute can only buy ready-made firepower. This reminds practitioners to check a company's compute reserves first, then match whether they are a potential stock or a battle-tested operator, otherwise even the strongest may fail to adapt.
Source: TMTPost report