Xiaomi recruits DeepSeek wunderkind Luo Fuli to turbocharge MiMo

• Luo, known domestically as an “AI prodigy,” rose to prominence after prolific research contributions and roles at Alibaba and High-Flyer Quant/DeepSeek before helping build DeepSeek-V2.

Luo Fuli, a prominent developer behind DeepSeek’s frontier AI models, said she has joined Xiaomi to work on artificial general intelligence, confirming months of speculation in a WeChat post.

“Intelligence will ultimately step beyond language into the physical world. I’m at Xiaomi MiMo… striving toward the AGI we envision,” she wrote, signaling a push to embed advanced AI across Xiaomi’s devices and vehicles.

Luo’s move follows reports that Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun personally courted her with a multimillion-dollar package, as the company looks to elevate its MiMo large language model and compete with leading Chinese and global AI systems.

Luo’s track record at DeepSeek—where models matched or beat top systems at lower cost—positions Xiaomi to accelerate on-device intelligence for phones and its expanding EV platform. Local industry coverage highlights that Luo’s appointment aligns with Xiaomi’s strategy to advance MiMo and AGI-oriented research in-house.

Xiaomi claims its MiMo-7B has outperformed larger peers on selected benchmarks, a sign the company aims to optimise smaller, efficient models for real-world applications.

Luo, known domestically as an “AI prodigy,” rose to prominence after prolific research contributions and roles at Alibaba and High-Flyer Quant/DeepSeek before helping build DeepSeek-V2, experience that could help Xiaomi close the gap with rivals in both cloud and edge AI deployment.