AI talented woman born in 1995, officially announced to join Xiaomi, Lei Jun earns millions of yuan annually to recruit talent

AI talent war sweeping global giants

Last year, Lei Jun offered a salary of tens of millions of yuan to poach talented AI women born in 1995. Now, she has finally been officially announced to join Xiaomi.

At the end of December 2024, multiple media outlets reported that Xiaomi founder Lei Jun personally came forward to recruit Luo Fuli, who had published 8 papers at international conferences and was one of the key developers of DeepSeek-V2, with an annual salary of tens of millions, to lead Xiaomi’s AI big model team.

But after that, neither side gave any official information, and Beverly slowly faded out of the public eye because she didn’t want to be overly disturbed. “I’m not a genius girl, I just want to do difficult and right things quietly,” she said

Whether she joined Xiaomi or not has also become a mystery.

Until November 12th, Luo Fuli posted on her social media account, officially confirming that she had joined Xiaomi.

Dust settles, join Xiaomi MiMo team

Although this is the official announcement of Luo Fuli, she already has many ties with Xiaomi.

In February of this year, Luo Fuli’s family revealed that she had started working in a new position, but her name did not appear in Xiaomi’s employee system at that time, which added a layer of suspense to her whereabouts.

In September, Luo Fuli commented on a post on Zhihu about the open-source development of Xiaomi’s voice model, stating that “Xiaomi has open-source a powerful voice model! It is recommended to implement it immediately”.

In October, her name appeared in the Xiaomi paper as the corresponding author, ranking last among the authors.

This paper was jointly signed by the “State Key Laboratory of Multimedia Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Peking University” and the “Xiaomi Model Core Team”, but the team of Luo Fuli was not marked.

Therefore, it is speculated that she may have collaborated on research or participated in it under a pseudonym.

And this official confirmation of joining completely shattered everyone’s previous speculations.

According to Luo Fuli, she is about to join the Xiaomi MiMo team, and her main focus is likely to be in the fields of “world models” and “embodied intelligence”.

Xiaomi MiMo is the first open-source inference model officially launched by Xiaomi in April this year, capable of processing three types of information: text, images, and speech.

Its biggest advantage is that it is well optimized on the end side, with low latency and low power consumption when running on hardware such as mobile phones and cars, and also supports local deployment.

However, compared to Doubao and DeepSeek, Xiaomi MiMo falls slightly short in terms of fluency and emotional understanding in daily conversations, as well as in terms of depth in professional fields and supporting tools.

Born into an ordinary rural family, recommended for admission to Peking University

Luo Fuli is a post-95s born into an ordinary family in a small town in Sichuan. Her father is an electrician and her mother is a teacher.

Before going to college, she had little exposure to computers and accidentally enrolled in the computer major at Beijing Normal University.

Due to her weak foundation, she was at the bottom of the class when she first enrolled. However, with her exceptional talent and relentless efforts, she quickly achieved a comeback and rose to the top of her grade. She also successfully applied for graduate school and entered the Institute of Computational Linguistics at Peking University.

After graduating with a master’s degree, Luo Fuli joined Alibaba Damo Academy as a researcher at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, where she was responsible for developing the multilingual pre training model VECO.

In 2022, she joined DeepSeek’s parent company, Magic Square Quantization, and worked on deep learning related work. Afterwards, she also served as a deep learning researcher at DeepSeek.

After the release of DeepSeek-V2, Luo Fuli stated, “In terms of the Chinese proficiency of the DeepSeek-V2 model, it is truly at the forefront of closed source models both domestically and internationally. ”

In addition, Luo Fuli is also a social media influencer who has opened personal accounts on multiple platforms, which is very interesting.

For example, her previous self introduction on the official account was like this:

A program girl who combines’ welfare ‘and’ loli ‘(shameless, haha), it’s great to meet you here

It was this strong and lively girl who, after half a year of public speculation, was eventually poached by Lei Jun to Xiaomi.

Xiaomi is betting on the ecosystem of people, cars, and homes, and the AI talent war is sweeping across major global companies

For Xiaomi, the addition of Luo Fuli not only adds a top talent, but also sends a strong signal of accelerating the implementation of its AI strategy.

At the 2025 Intelligent Connected Vehicle Conference in October, Lei Jun, founder of Xiaomi Group, clearly stated that AI big models are the future trend of intelligent connected vehicles, and Xiaomi’s core strategy is the “human car home ecosystem”, in which cars are an important node.

In the second quarter of this year, Xiaomi’s innovative business segments such as intelligent electric vehicles and AI achieved a revenue of 21.3 billion yuan, with a gross profit margin of 26.4%.

And Luo Fuli’s profound accumulation in multimodal interaction, lightweight deployment of large models, and other fields may enable Xiaomi AI to further understand complex scenarios and provide personalized recommendations.

Besides Xiaomi, major manufacturers around the world are fiercely competing in this field.

Last December, Dr. Zuo Pengfei from the School of Computer Science at Huazhong University of Science and Technology joined Huawei with an annual salary of 2.01 million yuan, the highest end “Huawei Genius Youth”, focusing on memory system and architecture research and development.

The same goes for foreign countries, with Meta being the craziest among them.

As of mid August this year, Meta has poached over 50 core employees from companies such as OpenAI, Google, Apple, and xAI, and some employees have even offered exorbitant salaries in the nine figure range.

Even OpenAI’s Chinese engineer Sun Zhiqing was poached by Meta shortly after he made his debut during a live broadcast.

According to industry estimates, the current supply-demand ratio for AI talent is only 1:10, indicating a serious imbalance between supply and demand.

In this wave of talent war, post-90s and post-00s with top university backgrounds and rich industry experience are gradually becoming mainstream.

The global battle for talent in the AI field has already ignited, and in the future, more big companies will join the battle and engage in more intense battles on this track.