Xiaomi gets female AI genius

Luo Fuli is rumored to be working at Xiaomi. Photo: Luo Fuli .

Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi, has successfully recruited Luo Fuli, who is known as the "AI genius girl" born in 1995, with a promised salary of up to 10 million yuan ( 1.4 million USD )/year.

The name Luo Fuli once again attracted attention when it appeared in an article jointly published by Xiaomi and Peking University, causing the Chinese technology community to discuss her connection with this phone company.

On October 14, a research paper co-authored by Xiaomi's large language modeling team and Peking University was published on the academic platform arXiv. In the author list, the name Fuli Luo appeared as the author, who is usually responsible for the project's main responsibilities, including managing funding, directing research, and approving the final content.

Therefore, Luo Fuli's holding this position seems to be the clearest evidence of her cooperation with Xiaomi.

In December 2024, during a live broadcast, Lei Jun announced that Xiaomi was willing to pay tens of millions of yuan to recruit core developers of the DeepSeek-V2 model. At that time, the keywords “female genius” and “tens of millions of yuan salary” quickly became hot topics on Chinese social networks.

However, neither side has made an official announcement. By February this year, some sources said that Luo Fuli had left DeepSeek and started a new job, but did not disclose the location. On February 18, she posted on WeChat Moments expressing her desire to work in a stable environment.

“Please give me back a quiet space. I have said many times that I am not a 'genius girl'. When you are deified, the more you are praised, the easier it is to stumble,” Luo Fuli wrote.

Although there has been no official announcement about Luo Fuli joining Xiaomi, her being named as the corresponding author of the joint research paper between Xiaomi and Peking University has caused a lot of speculation. According to Chinese media, she is not listed in Xiaomi's internal system and the list of research teams does not clearly state which unit she belongs to.

Born in 1995, Luo Fuli graduated from Beijing Normal University and then went on to pursue graduate studies at Peking University. During her studies, she published eight papers at the leading ACL conference on computational linguistics. She led the development of multilingual models at Alibaba's DAMO Research Institute before joining Magic Square Quantitative and participating in the development of DeepSeek-V2.

Tech insiders say the pursuit of Luo Fuli reflects the fierce competition in China’s AI industry. As AI phones explode and the iPhone loses its edge in the domestic market, attracting top talent is seen as key for tech companies. Even Xiaomi, which has developed many AI products such as its virtual assistant Xiao AI, needs to strengthen its capabilities in new areas such as multimodal interaction.

Source: https://znews.vn/xiaomi-loi-keo-thanh-cong-nu-thien-tai-ai-post1594497.html