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. — SCMP
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.
The model was developed by Xiaomi’s specialised AI task force, known as Core, the company said.
Xiaomi’s stock price in Hong Kong gained 4.7% in morning trading on Friday, while shares of Kingsoft Cloud Holdings – in which Xiaomi holds a 10% stake and Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun holds 11% – jumped 15.3%.
The launch of the model aligns with earlier reports that Xiaomi has 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.
Xiaomi’s AI model comes at a time when China’s deep-pocketed Big Tech firms are beginning to show their strengths in developing foundational models, driven by the commercial potential of combining their products with AI.
Alibaba on Tuesday unveiled the highly anticipated third generation of its open-source Qwen models, which promises faster processing and enhanced multilingual capabilities. The release intensifies an already heated Chinese market, which has been flooded with competing products over the past couple of years.
The Qwen3 series comes in eight sizes, from 600 million to 235 billion parameters, with enhancements across all versions, according to the Qwen team at Alibaba Cloud, the unit responsible for the company’s AI efforts. – South China Morning Post
