Smartphone giant Xiaomi unveils AI model, joining fierce competition in China

Xiaomi says its open-source MiMo reasoning model, trained completely in-house, rivals the performance of OpenAI’s o1-mini and Alibaba’s QwQ-32B

Reading Time:2 minutes

Xiaomi, which recently broke into China’s electric vehicle market, is now making its own artificial intelligence models as it looks to infuse its hardware with generative AI. Photo: AFP

Published: 1:28pm, 30 Apr 2025Updated: 5:05pm, 30 Apr 2025

Chinese smartphone and electric vehicle maker Xiaomi on Friday unveiled a new reasoning artificial intelligence (AI) model developed in-house, underscoring the company’s ambition to integrate its hardware products with home-grown generative AI.

The open-source MiMo model has 7 billion parameters and outperformed OpenAI’s o1-mini and Alibaba Group Holding’s QwQ-32B-Preview, part of the Qwen series of models, in maths reasoning and coding, Xiaomi said in a statement. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.

MiMo is Xiaomi’s first large language model (LLM), and the company said it was developed using reinforcement learning by its specialised AI task force, known as Core.

Xiaomi’s stock price in Hong Kong rose 5.3 per cent on Friday to HK$49.95, while shares of Kingsoft Cloud Holdings – in which Xiaomi holds a 10 per cent stake and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun holds 11 per cent – jumped 14.2 per cent to HK$7.4.

The launch of the model aligns with earlier reports that Xiaomi had been building up its computing resources. According to a report by local media outlet Jiemian in December, Xiaomi bought about 10,000 graphics processing units to train its models.

Xiaomi’s AI ambitions were evident when the company made an offer to hire Luo Fuli, China’s AI “genius girl” from DeepSeek. Luo, a key contributor to the DeepSeek-V2 model, ultimately declined the offer.