Lei Jun promoted Luo Fuli to the highest job rank at Xiaomi.

Luo Fuli has been promoted again.

According to LatePost, Xiaomi released a round of internal promotion lists on September 22. Luo Fuli, the 31-year-old head of Xiaomi's large model team, has been promoted to Level 22. Sources close to Xiaomi said that Level 22 is already the highest level in Xiaomi's current rank system, and further promotions will mainly be changes in job responsibilities.

This "Level 22" is extremely valuable.

Back in 2019, when *Caijing* reported on Xiaomi's establishment of the rank system, it mentioned that Xiaomi's internal ranks ranged from Level 13 to Level 22. At that time, Levels 19-20 roughly corresponded to director positions, and Level 22 was at the vice president level. Of course, seven or eight years have passed, the corresponding relationship between Xiaomi's internal ranks and positions may have changed, so "Level 22" cannot be simply equated with "vice president".

But one thing is almost certain:

This is the top level.

Moreover, Luo Fuli has been in Xiaomi for less than a year.

On November 12, 2025, she officially confirmed joining Xiaomi MiMo on her WeChat Moments. Counting to this promotion on September 22, it is only about ten months.

Office workers reading this may have silently closed the rank promotion form.

PS: Many friends have consulted me, Guai Ge, about which direction to switch careers or change jobs now. I will not hesitate to advise everyone to go to AI companies or AI-related businesses every time, which is in line with the current investment direction of bosses and capital, with high salaries and many opportunities...

Lei Jun seems to have made the right hire this time

Luo Fuli's joining Xiaomi caused quite a stir at the time.

At the end of 2024, some media reported that Lei Jun believed that Xiaomi started late in large models, so he personally participated in recruiting large model talents who can lead teams, including Luo Fuli, who was still at DeepSeek at that time. The salary figure spread by the outside world once reached "tens of millions of yuan". Later, in November 2025, Luo Fuli officially announced her joining MiMo, and the matter was completely confirmed.

Everyone should be quite familiar with her resume.

She got her bachelor's degree in Computer Science from Beijing Normal University, and then studied for a master's degree in Computational Linguistics at Peking University. After graduation, she joined Alibaba Damo Academy, working on multilingual pre-training models VECO and AliceMind. In 2022, she joined High-Flyer, and later became a researcher at DeepSeek, participating in the R&D of models such as DeepSeek-V2.

At that time, everyone was discussing:

Is it worth it for Lei Jun to spend so much money to hire a head of large model?

Now at least judging from the progress of MiMo, Xiaomi has obviously begun to accelerate.

On September 22, the same day when the internal promotion list was announced, Xiaomi released and open-sourced MiMo-V2.6-Pro and MiMo-V2.6-Flash.

Among them, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scored 46 points on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index v4.3.2, surpassing Kimi K3's 44 points and GLM-5.3's 45 points at that time, making it one of the open-weight models with the highest scores on this list. The previous generation MiMo-V2.5-Pro scored 26 points, and the score of this generation was directly increased by 20 points. Of course, there is still a gap with GPT-6 Astra and Claude Fable 5.1, which scored 53 points on the list.

What's more remarkable is the training intensity.

Xiaomi disclosed that after this round of reinforcement learning, the training took less than 6 days. The total cost of the Flash and Pro versions exceeded 3.47 million US dollars, and a total of about 750,000 trajectories were generated. Some time ago, Luo Fuli even live-streamed the training of MiMo. Looking back now, that live stream was indeed burning real money.

Lei Jun: I'll give you all the funding you need.

Luo Fuli: Okay, the funding is used up, and the model is ready.

Behind this promotion, there is another more important change

I think what is really worth paying attention to about Luo Fuli's promotion to Level 22 is not her age.

But that the position of MiMo within Xiaomi is changing.

In July this year, Xiaomi just readjusted the AI organizational structure behind "Xiao Ai".

After the adjustment, the basic model capabilities of Xiao Ai are directly provided by the MiMo team led by Luo Fuli; the Luan Jian team is responsible for the cloud engineering and Harness outside the model; the OS teams of mobile phones, automobiles and other businesses are responsible for the end-side capabilities.

This change is crucial.

In the past, when we looked at MiMo, it was more like seeing that "Xiaomi has also developed a large model".

Now it has begun to evolve into Xiaomi's unified AI infrastructure.

It can be connected to Xiao Ai, mobile phones, automobiles, computers, and even robots in the future.

This is also the difference between Xiaomi and many pure large model companies.

Companies such as Kimi, DeepSeek and Zhipu still need to find their own super entry points after their models become strong. Xiaomi happens to have a large number of ready-made entry points: mobile phones, automobiles, tablets, TVs, watches, home appliances, all covered by HyperOS.

What Xiaomi has long lacked is an AI infrastructure that is strong enough, low-cost enough, and fully controlled by itself.

MiMo is filling this gap.

Lei Jun also emphasized on many occasions this year that Xiaomi will continue to increase R&D investment in the next five years, planning to invest 200 billion yuan from 2026 to 2030, and hopes to achieve the "great convergence" of self-developed chips, self-developed OS and self-developed large AI models on terminals.

In this context, it is not so surprising that Luo Fuli was promoted to the highest rank this time.

What she is in charge of now is no longer just a model project.

If Xiaomi really intends to embed AI into every corner of the "full human-vehicle-home ecosystem", MiMo will become more and more like the underlying infrastructure.

Of course, the pressure will be even greater next.

Getting 46 points on the ranking list is only the first step. For Xiaomi, what really determines the value of MiMo is that one day when users pick up a Xiaomi mobile phone, sit in a Xiaomi car, or even turn on the TV at home, they can clearly feel:

This device has truly become smarter because of AI.

At that point, the investment Lei Jun made in hiring Luo Fuli at a high price will be fully rewarded.

This article is from the WeChat official account "Everyone is a Product Manager" (ID: woshipm), author: Guai Ge, published with authorization from 36Kr.