Lei Jun holds a heavy stake in a 31-year-old outstanding female leader.

This is arguably the most valued talent of Lei Jun at present.

Xiaomi recently released an internal promotion list, with Luo Fuli, the 31-year-old head of the large model team, promoted to level 22. This means that from the official announcement of her joining in November 2025 to reaching the top of Xiaomi's job level ceiling, she only took a mere 10 months.

In this way, she has set the fastest promotion record in Xiaomi's history.

This young woman from Yibin, Sichuan Province, graduated from Beijing Normal University with a bachelor's degree and Peking University with a master's degree. Her well-known experience includes working at DeepSeek, where she was once dubbed a "genius girl" by the outside world, before being recruited by Lei Jun with a generous compensation package. However, she has repeatedly stated publicly that she is not a genius, and just wants to get things done quietly.

From a broader perspective, Luo Fuli's exceptional promotion is a true microcosm of the talent competition in China's AI industry. This group of young people is leading the development trend of China's AI industry.

The Post-1995 Girl Recruited by Lei Jun

The Fastest Promotion Speed

In just 10 months, Luo Fuli's career at Xiaomi has been advancing full steam ahead.

Along with the promotion news, the MiMo team has officially released and open-sourced the Xiaomi MiMo-V2.6 series, which includes two native full-modal models, Pro and Flash. Benefiting from the expansion of RL computing power, MiMo-V2.6-Pro scored 46 points in the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index (AA Comprehensive Intelligence Index), ranking first among open-source weight models; at the same level of intelligence, its price is only 1/20 to 1/60 of that of overseas models.

The MiMo team regards this as a key step in exploring the RSI (Recursive Self-Improvement) path. Luo Fuli admitted, "The research innovation and engineering challenges behind this work exceed those of DeepSeek R1, in which I once participated partially."

According to public information, excluding Lei Jun, the founder of Xiaomi, there are 13 to 22 job levels within Xiaomi Group, among which directors correspond to levels 19 to 20, and vice presidents correspond to levels 21 to 22. The total annual salary of Xiaomi employees at level 19 can reach more than 2 million yuan, which means the compensation for level 22 is even higher. In other words, after leading the team to complete the release of the new model, Luo Fuli has been among the core executives of Xiaomi.

Tracing the whole story of Luo Fuli joining Xiaomi, it all started with a trending search.

Earlier last year, according to a report by Securities Times, Lei Jun once intended to poach Luo Fuli with an annual salary of 10 million yuan, which made her unexpectedly popular. Then in November last year, she posted on her WeChat Moments that "intelligence will eventually move from language to the physical world", announcing that she had joined the Xiaomi MiMo team.

Soon, Luo Fuli completed her first public appearance at Xiaomi. At the Xiaomi "Human-Car-Home Full Ecosystem" Partner Conference in December last year, she officially appeared in public as the head of the MiMo large model.

In March this year, Xiaomi released three models at one go, including the flagship base model Xiaomi MiMo-V2-Pro for the agent era, as well as the full-modal base model Xiaomi MiMo-V2-Omni and the speech synthesis model Xiaomi MiMo-V2-TTS.

At that time, Luo Fuli posted on social media, "I call this a silent ambush — not because we had a plan, but because the shift from the Chat to Agent paradigm happened so quickly that even we ourselves could barely believe it. Somewhere in between, there is a process that is both exciting, painful and fascinating."

In July this year, Xiaomi adjusted the organizational structure of Xiaoai Classmate, splitting its technical capabilities into three parts: base model, cloud side and device side. Among them, the base model capabilities are provided by the MiMo team led by Luo Fuli, which also indicates that her business scope of authority has been further expanded. Up to this promotion, Luo Fuli has reached the top of Xiaomi's job level ceiling in just 10 months.

Lei Jun's strong desire for young AI talents goes without saying.

Liang Wenfeng Couldn't Keep Her

The Growth History of Luo Fuli

Behind Luo Fuli, there is not the legendary story of rising to fame at a young age as imagined by the outside world.

Born into an ordinary family in Yibin in 1995, Luo Fuli studied at Yibin No.1 High School during her high school years. Her head teacher once commented that "she was not the top student, but was diligent enough." Later, she was admitted to the Computer Science major of Beijing Normal University, and in her own words, she was an absolute "low starter" in the computer field. Even so, Luo Fuli started preparing for postgraduate recommendation to the Computer Science major of Peking University in her sophomore year, and finally achieved her wish through hard work.

At first, her research interest focused on a subfield of Natural Language Processing (NLP) — word sense disambiguation. However, with the rise of large model technology, she judged that the essence of traditional disambiguation tasks was being covered by the "next token prediction" paradigm of large models. Therefore, she decisively shifted her research focus to text generation, which laid the groundwork for her later development of large models.

The year when Luo Fuli really stood out was 2019, when she published 8 papers at ACL, the top international conference in the field of natural language processing, 2 of which were first-author papers. The label of "genius girl" came along with it.

However, Luo Fuli has an almost instinctive rejection of this label. She once said bluntly in an interview with the Peking University Alumni Association that such labels are stereotypes created to attract attention, "It whitewashes the real effort, perseverance and total dedication in the scientific research process, implying that success is innate."

Recalling the years of postgraduate study at Peking University, Luo Fuli once sighed, "The free scientific research environment at Peking University benefited me a lot." At the same time, Peking University also gave her the earliest "enlightenment of collaboration". In the laboratory of Peking University, she experienced the power of teamwork for the first time: some classmates were good at building GPU clusters, while others specialized in algorithms, and everyone gave full play to their strengths.

After graduating with a master's degree, Luo Fuli chose Alibaba as the first stop of her career. She joined Alibaba Damo Academy through the "Alibaba Star" program, serving as a researcher at the Machine Intelligence Laboratory, engaged in artificial intelligence research. There, she led the development of the multilingual pre-trained model VECO, and promoted the open-source work of AliceMind.

Three years later, Luo Fuli joined DeepSeek's parent company High-Flyer to engage in deep learning related work, and later served as a deep learning researcher at DeepSeek, participating in the development of models such as DeepSeek-V2. With the emergence of the DeepSeek large model, Luo Fuli began to appear more frequently in the spotlight. She once summarized, "That experience at DeepSeek was a major turning point."

Looking back, there is no shortcut or luck in Luo Fuli's growth path, which is a typical long-termist technical compound interest achievement, and she has always adhered to a deified self-cognition. As she said, she is not a genius, and her starting point is very ordinary. "It is the curiosity to explore essential problems, good execution and a little bit of unyielding tenacity that have led me step by step to where I am today."

AI Competition

The Golden Age for Top Talents

A battle for AI talents has emerged quietly.

It reminds people of a previous scene — in December last year, Tencent appointed Yao Shuyu, a former OpenAI researcher, as its chief AI scientist, when he was only 27 years old; then the Hunyuan Multimodal Model Department and the Large Language Model Department merged to form the Foundation Model Department, which is uniformly managed by this young man.

ByteDance is also going all out. Earlier this year, Guo Daya, a core researcher of DeepSeek, left his position and was chased by a number of large internet companies, and finally he chose to join ByteDance's Seed department. At the same time, ByteDance launched the "Top Seed" campus recruitment program, recruiting 30 top fresh doctoral graduates globally, emphasizing that it offers top-level compensation in the industry with no upper limit.

Baidu has also joined this competition — in July this year, Sun Tianxiang, born in 1997, officially joined Baidu as the head of the Foundation Model R&D Department, and at the same time joined Baidu's Model Committee. This PhD in Computer Science from Fudan University is the first core developer of MOSS, a ChatGPT-like open-source large model, and took the lead in putting forward the concept of Model-as-a-Service (MaaS) internationally.

When young people have not yet graduated from campus, large companies have rushed to extend olive branches to them.

Tencent officially launched the "Qingyun Program" intern recruitment in March this year, opening six major technical fields including large language models, multimodality, and intelligent agents, with no upper limit on compensation policies; Moonshot AI announced the launch of the Kimi Top Talent "Through Program", which grants ungraduated interns company options; MiniMax also launched the Top Talent Program, and Yan Junjie, the CEO, even publicly stated that for truly top talents, there is no upper limit on salary and options, no seniority requirements, and the only thing that matters is how big the problem you can solve.

As early as the end of 2025, Business Insider disclosed a set of data — a 4-6 month AI internship and short-term research program already has a monthly salary ranging from 7,000 to 18,000 US dollars, equivalent to about 49,000 to 126,000 RMB. According to a report by LatePost, the annual salary of ByteDance's Top Seed campus recruits in 2024 was about 1.5 million yuan, rose to 3 million to 5 million yuan in 2025, and some core positions even offered 6 million yuan in 2026, doubling year after year.

There is no doubt that the domestic competition for AI talents has been fully upgraded, from the early stage of snatching talents with high salaries and rolling out welfare benefits, to an all-round heavy talent investment model of strategic empowerment, resource tilting, and exceptional promotion in job levels. This also marks that young technical talents have become the core competitiveness that determines the performance of AI enterprises and influences the development trend of the industry.

The paths of Luo Fuli, Yao Shuyu and others provide a reference for young people, which is not the "genius narrative", but a more simple logic: continuously accumulate engineering capabilities in the right direction, make cutting-edge technologies implementable, and then amplify your value on a sufficiently large platform.

As Luo Fuli's advice to young people at the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) Conference: always maintain the desire to explore and curiosity. "Make the most of cutting-edge AI tools, and develop your own unique judgment and scientific research aesthetics in the process of continuous trial and error. In the era of rapid technological change, unique cognition, judgment and aesthetics are the most core and irreplaceable competitiveness of young people."

In the final analysis, the competition of AI is never just a competition of models and computing power, but a competition of talent density.

It is certain that the change of the next-generation AI landscape will not happen at a press conference of a certain enterprise, but at those moments when these young people decide "what to do and what not to do". The direction they choose is the direction of China's AI.

This article is from the WeChat Official Account "InvestmentChina" (ID: pedaily2012), written by Liu Bo, authorized for release by 36Kr.