On December 24, 2024, at 14:28:00, Lei Jun’s recruitment of the “genius AI girl” Luo Fuli attracted attention. Luo Fuli graduated with a master’s degree in computational linguistics from Peking University and once worked at Alibaba’s DAMO Academy and participated in the research and development of DeepSeek-V2. Lei Jun personally stepped in and offered heavy rewards to recruit core talents, even offering a salary of tens of millions of yuan. What exactly is Xiaomi’s plan?
The large model “activates” the stock market of mobile phones. With the improvement of chip computing power, the application of AI Agent on smartphones has become the norm and will become the core moat for brands to maintain user groups. According to IDC’s prediction, the shipment volume of China’s new generation of AI mobile phone market in 2025 will be considerable. Although Xiaomi’s smartphone business has grown and its high-end strategy has initially shown results, in the stage of market stockpiling, large model technology has become the key for brands to break through. AI technology has been integrated into all aspects of mobile phones, and large models bring a qualitative leap. Compared with OPPO and vivo, Xiaomi is relatively low-key in promoting large model technology and there is room for improvement in multimodal interaction and other aspects.
The founder of Xiaomi Group, Lei Jun, said that making large models focuses on breakthroughs in lightweight and local deployment. Considering costs, calling cloud-side large models requires payment and has high computing power requirements, while end-side local computing can save on cloud computing power expenses. From the perspective of user composition, Xiaomi users have a high acceptance of new Internet technologies and also have a high acceptance of Xiaoai classmate. From the product aspect, Xiaomi mobile phone users have high requirements for performance, creating conditions for localized AI. In addition, Xiaomi has a large number of AIoT devices and has a high demand for lightweight. Although the effect of end-side large models is difficult to match that of the cloud, it has advantages in privacy protection, low latency, and cost control.
In 2024, Xiaomi launched the AISP image processing platform and the large language model MiLM based on large models and achieved end-side deployment. In order to ensure the effect of the locally deployed model, technologies such as hardware acceleration modules have been developed.
Xiaomi’s recruitment of Luo Fuli not only values her research ability but also because her research direction is in line with Xiaomi’s large model strategy. Luo Fuli’s joining continues Xiaomi’s tradition of recruiting top talents. In recent years, Xiaomi has attracted top AI talents from around the world to enhance its technological strength. Lei Jun said that Xiaomi will increase investment in cutting-edge technologies such as AI and attract top talents by not only providing high salaries but also creating an open research environment and a diverse technology exchange platform and collaborating with universities and research institutions.
Unlike other mobile phone companies, Xiaomi has an automotive business. Lei Jun proposed empowering the “human-vehicle-home” ecosystem through AI. On the Xiaomi SU7, users can deeply control the car and other devices with Xiaoai classmate. Intelligent driving has become a must-compete area for new energy vehicles. Xiaomi’s intelligent driving system has been integrated with multimodal large model technology and has undergone three major upgrades within half a year. On December 23, the Xiaomi SU7 was integrated with a vision-language large model, and the charging map was upgraded and cooperated with other vehicle companies. Xiaomi’s large model technology also goes deep into the AIoT ecosystem and accelerates the process of device interconnection.
Recruiting Luo Fuli indicates Xiaomi’s determination to make efforts in the large model track. The goal is to create a complete intelligent living scene that integrates “human, vehicle, and home”. However, the competition in the large model track is fierce. Xiaomi faces challenges in technology accumulation and market influence. It needs to transform its strategy into user-perceivable experience differences and form a closed-loop ecosystem. Can Xiaomi fly higher and farther standing on the tuyere of large models? The answer lies in the intelligent terminals empowered by AI.
