Chinese AI prodigy Luo Fuli leaves DeepSeek for Xiaomi

In a post on X on Wednesday, Luo confirmed her new role at Beijing-based Xiaomi, where she will head a team of "creative and talented" members. "Intelligence will inevitably evolve from language to the physical world, unlocking spatial intelligence for multi-modal perception, reasoning, generation, and action—essential for true AGI," Luo wrote.

Launched in April, MiMo is Xiaomi’s first large language model, developed using reinforcement learning under the company’s AI task force, Core, according to the South China Morning Post.

Chinese AI expert Luo Fuli. Photo courtesy of Luo's X

Luo’s move ends a year-long period of speculation, following reports that the Chinese tech giant had approached the former DeepSeek researcher with a lucrative offer, Pandaily reported. Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun reportedly offered Luo a salary in the "tens of millions" of yuan (1 million yuan = US$140,592) to help boost the company’s AI efforts. However, neither Xiaomi nor Luo confirmed the offer. In October 2025, Luo was listed as an "independent researcher" in Xiaomi’s latest AI paper.

Luo, 30, graduated from Beijing Normal University with a bachelor’s degree in computer science. She became the face of China’s rising AI talent in 2019 while pursuing her master’s degree in computational linguistics at Peking University.

After completing her master’s, Luo joined Alibaba's DAMO Academy as a researcher in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory. In 2022, she joined Liang Wenfeng’s hedge fund, High-Flyer Quant, which owns DeepSeek. She later continued her work as a deep-learning researcher at DeepSeek, contributing to the development of models such as DeepSeek-V2, Chinese news site 36Kr reported.