Lei Jun "Ten Million Annual Salary" poaches DeepSeek's talented girl, Luo Fuli, discusses Xiaomi's MiMo model for the first time

Known as the DeepSeek genius girl by the outside world and once famous for rumors of Lei Jun offering a “tens of millions annual salary” to poach her, AI researcher Luo Fuli recently spoke out publicly on the X platform. She introduced the latest model family—MiMo-V2-Pro, Omni, and TTS—as a member of the Xiaomi MiMo team. In her post, she described this as a “quiet ambush” and frankly stated that the shift from Chat to Agent paradigms happened so quickly that even her team found it hard to believe at times.

Luo Fuli: MiMo is a model built for Agents

She mentioned that the 1T base model of MiMo had begun training several months ago. The original goal was to improve long-context reasoning efficiency. Later, they discovered that designs like Hybrid Attention, 1M context window, and MTP inference perfectly provided the structural advantages needed for the Age of Agents. This aligns with Xiaomi’s emphasis on ultra-long context and hybrid attention architecture in the MiMo-V2 series.

MiMo-V2-Pro, Omni, and TTS are the team’s first full-stack models truly designed for the Agent era. She described this release as a “quiet ambush”: not a deliberate layout, but because the industry’s rapid shift from Chat to Agent was so fast that even her team found it hard to believe at times.

She revealed that what truly changed the team’s pace was their first-hand experience with complex agentic scaffolds, which she calls orchestrated Context. This completely ignited the team’s imagination about the potential of Agent systems and directly accelerated their R&D speed.

Rumors of Lei Jun offering a “tens of millions annual salary” to poach the DeepSeek genius girl

Luo Fuli has attracted attention due to her journey from academia and industry to becoming a star team member. Public reports show she was born in Yibin, Sichuan, studied computer science at Beijing Normal University for her undergraduate degree, and then pursued further studies in computational linguistics at Peking University. In 2022, she joined the Fantasia Quantitative team and later the DeepSeek team, participating in the development of models like DeepSeek-V2. As a result, many media outlets regard her as one of the key developers of this open-source large model.

As DeepSeek quickly gained fame in the global AI community, Luo Fuli was also portrayed by the media as a “female core developer born after 1995.” However, compared to the external labels like “genius girl” or “AI prodigy,” she has explicitly stated in the past that she does not want to be idolized or entertainmentized. She hopes others see her abilities and steady progress rather than a glamorous story. This attitude has also strengthened her recognition outside the tech circle.

From late 2024 to early 2025, Chinese media widely circulated news that Lei Jun offered her a “tens of millions annual salary.” By November 2025, she officially announced her joining Xiaomi and wrote that she is working with the Xiaomi MiMo research team to advance the AGI vision. The public generally believes that Xiaomi values her practical experience in MoE architecture, large model training efficiency, lightweight design, and cost control—aligning closely with Xiaomi’s long-term focus on local deployment, edge AI, and the “full ecosystem of people, vehicles, and homes.”

This article, “Lei Jun’s ‘Tens of Millions Salary’ to Poach DeepSeek Genius Girl Luo Fuli—First Talk on Xiaomi’s MiMo Model,” originally appeared on Chain News ABMedia.