Xiaomi Makes Power Play: Chinese Tech Giant Lures DeepSeek’s AI Genius in Strategic Talent Grab
Xiaomi just fired the latest salvo in China's AI arms race—snatching a top DeepSeek researcher in a move that screams 'hardware meets AGI ambition.'
The Beijing bulldozer: While Western tech firms freeze hiring, Xiaomi's aggressively poaching AI talent to dominate smart ecosystems. Their new recruit reportedly led breakthrough work in multimodal reasoning at DeepSeek.
Follow the money: This comes as Xiaomi's EV division burns cash faster than a Bitcoin miner in summer. Because what's better than losing $10,000 per car sold? Overpaying for AI researchers who'll probably get poached by ByteDance in 18 months.
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Key Player
Chinese AI prodigy Luo Fuli said she had joined Xiaomi after leaving her role as a researcher with DeepSeek. She was hailed as being a key player in the development of DeepSeek’s V2 model which rattled U.S. tech stocks such as Nvidia (NVDA) and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) earlier this year.
In a WeChat post today Luo said she had joined Xiaomi to help it develop its AI ambitions.
“Intelligence will step beyond language into the physical world,” Luo wrote. “I’m at Xiaomi MiMo, with a group of creative, talented and sincere researchers to build a future like that.”
MiMo, which was launched back in April, is Xiaomi’s first large-language model and was developed using reinforcement learning under the company’s AI task force known as Core.
MiMo Magic
According to Xiaomi, MiMo has outperformed OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Alibaba (BABA) Cloud’s QwQ-32B models in certain benchmark tests, despite having a smaller parameter size.
Xiaomi reportedly took months to lure Luo away from DeepSeek and is a clear indication of the intense competition between China’s fast-growing AI tigers.
They are all being boosted by the stellar support for the sector from the Chinese government. In recent years President Xi has had a lukewarm attitude to the private sector but his desire to match and eventually overtake the U.S. in the AI race means that tech firms are now much more in favor.
As an example, earlier this month China ordered new state-backed data centers to use only local AI chips. The rule reportedly affects any project that gets government money. Moreover, centers that are less than 30% complete must remove or cancel plans to buy foreign chips.
Xiaomi also has a number of other strings to its bows including mobile phones and electric vehicles where it is also challenging the likes of Apple (AAPL) and Tesla (TSLA).
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