Luo Fuli makes a C-position appearance at Xiaomi, officially announcing after leaving DeepSeek for the first time!

Today, Luo Fuli officially announced her position at Xiaomi as the center of attention.

Just now, Luo Fuli made a high-profile announcement on X—she has officially joined Xiaomi as the head of the MiMo team.

The evolution of intelligence will inevitably move from the world of language to the physical world, unlocking multimodal spatial intelligence—capable of perception, reasoning, generation, and action. This is a key step towards achieving true Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).

I am leading a creative and talented team at Xiaomi MiMo to drive this process forward.

A Year of Rumors Materialized

In fact, as early as the end of last year, there were reports that Luo Fuli, who previously worked at DeepSeek, was brought to Xiaomi by Lei Jun with a "ten million annual salary."

There are several intriguing timelines in this:

On December 25, the DeepSeek-V3 version was launched and announced to be fully open-sourced.

Just one day later, media reports revealed that Xiaomi was assembling a GPU cluster of ten thousand cards.

By the last day of 2024, Lei Jun publicly disclosed Xiaomi's ambitions in AI during a New Year's live broadcast.

After the automotive business is on track, the next step is to fully enter the deep waters of AI.

It was also around that time that rumors began to circulate: Lei Jun was trying to recruit core developer Luo Fuli from DeepSeek with a ten million annual salary, hoping to have her lead Xiaomi's AI laboratory.

Last month, Luo Fuli's name also appeared prominently in the author list of the latest paper from the Xiaomi AI team, although she was listed as an "independent researcher."

Now, the dots have connected, and the news has been confirmed.

Luo Fuli's prominence is partly due to the attention on Xiaomi and Lei Jun, and partly due to her previous reputation in the industry.

Who is Luo Fuli?

Luo Fuli graduated with a bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Beijing Normal University and pursued a master's degree in Computational Linguistics at Peking University. During this time, she published papers at several top NLP conferences.

After graduating with her master's degree, Luo Fuli joined Alibaba DAMO Academy as a researcher in the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, where she was responsible for developing the multilingual pre-training model VECO and promoting the open-source work of the AliceMind project In 2022, Luo Fuli joined DeepSeek's parent company, Huanfang Quantitative, to engage in deep learning-related work, and later served as a deep learning researcher at DeepSeek, participating in the development of models such as DeepSeek-V2.

As of now, Luo Fuli's academic papers have total citations exceeding 11,000, with approximately 8,000 citations added just this year.

In DeepSeek's latest Nature cover paper, Luo Fuli's name is prominently listed, clearly indicating her contributions to the DeepSeek model. However, her introduction at that time still referred to her as an — independent researcher in Beijing.

As for why she is labeled as an "independent researcher," it remains unclear, as it is essentially an open secret that she was poached by Xiaomi.

One theory suggests it is to avoid competition.

In fact, before Luo Fuli's self-announcement, she had not explicitly engaged in large model development as a Xiaomi employee.

Of course, as an independent researcher, Luo Fuli played a bridging role in Xiaomi's latest MiMo paper, connecting Xiaomi and the Peking University team — the corresponding author is her mentor from Peking University.

Xiaomi's MiMo is indeed the core brand for Xiaomi's advancement in large model development, although earlier, not much was known about its goals and directions.

Now, with Luo Fuli's official announcement, Xiaomi MiMo has also been clarified, aiming at the forefront — spatial intelligence.

Yes, what Luo Fuli refers to as "moving from the world of language to the physical world, unlocking multimodal spatial intelligence — with the capabilities of perception, reasoning, generation, and action," is the ability towards ultimate AGI, also referred to as "spatial intelligence."

Just yesterday, AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li published a lengthy article, systematically explaining the concept of "spatial intelligence" for the first time, and its significant implications for embodied intelligence and AGI.

In simple terms, spatial intelligence is the ultimate concept that connects information AI and physical AI, achieving the integration of the digital world and the physical world.

This is naturally the most compelling technological vision, and it aligns perfectly with the scenarios that Xiaomi possesses, as information AI and physical AI, from the online world to the real world, can be viewed from a more human-centered dimension, which is clearly articulated by Lei Jun — the full ecosystem of people, cars, and homes.

Author of this article: Lu Yu Jay, Source: Quantum Bit, Original Title: "Luo Fuli makes a C-position appearance at Xiaomi, officially announces after leaving DeepSeek!"

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