DeepSeek prodigy Luo Fuli joins Xiaomi

AI wunderkind Luo Fuli, a key developer behind the DeepSeek models, has announced that she is now working for the Chinese tech giant Xiaomi in pursuit of artificial general intelligence (AGI).

For the first time after months of speculation, Luo appeared to confirm that she now works for the Beijing-based phone and electric car maker Xiaomi. She shared the news on WeChat, a social media platform and payment app popular in China.

“Intelligence will ultimately step beyond language into the physical world. I’m at Xiaomi MiMo, working with a group of creative, talented, and sincerely passionate researchers to build such a future – striving toward the AGI we envision,” she said in a post in Mandarin.

AGI has become a buzzword in the Chinese tech community, with companies like Alibaba announcing plans to move to what they described as the next stage of AI – and beyond.

Xiaomi’s chief executive, Lei Jun, has reportedly personally recruited Luo with an annual salary offer of tens of millions of yuan, or several million dollars. Xiaomi has not publicly commented on the deal.

Xiaomi may be looking to Luo to bring MiMo, its first large language model released earlier this year, to the forefront of the AI race, both at home and globally. Xiaomi already claims that its MiMo-7B model outperformed Alibaba’s QwQ-32B and OpenAI’s GPT-4o in some benchmark tests despite its smaller parameter size.

Luo’s track record as a key developer of DeepSeek’s models, which challenged US dominance in the field by matching or surpassing leading systems at a fraction of the cost, is likely to reinforce Xiaomi’s ambitions of integrating AI in its home and car systems.

Who is Luo Fuli?

Luo is an AI researcher born in Yibin, China’s Sichuan province, in 1995. She had little exposure to computers while growing up, according to Chinese media.

It was reported that Luo joined Beijing Normal University in 2013 as a computer science student “by accident,” but it soon became clear she was exceptionally gifted in the field.

Following her initial studies, she earned a direct admission to a master’s program in computation linguistics at prestigious Peking University.

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Luo rose to prominence in 2019 after contributing to eight papers at the annual meeting of the Association of Computational Linguistics, according to the South China Morning Post.

After graduating, she joined Alibaba, and later the Chinese hedge fund High-Flyer Quant, which owns DeepSeek. Both were founded by entrepreneur Liang Wenfeng.

Eventually, Luo ended up as a deep learning researcher at DeepSeek, contributing to the development of the DeepSeek-V2 model.

Her academic and work achievements earned her the moniker “AI prodigy” in China, where she has become a celebrity.

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