Ten million annual salary! Lei Jun suddenly announced

Lei Jun personally digs people, 95s genius AI girl, annual salary of tens of millions!

In the movie ‘A World Without Thieves’, there is a classic line: ‘What is the most precious thing in the 21st century? Talent!’.

Recently, the domestic large-scale model DeepSeek has become popular worldwide, and has also brought fame to a 95s AI ‘genius girl’ Luo Fuli. According to the Securities Times, Lei Jun personally made the move to recruit her! It is reported that the compensation paid is at the tens of millions level.

Post-95s AI ‘Genius Girl’ Goes Viral! Lei Jun Poaches with a Million-Dollar Annual Salary

The wind of AI big models has finally blown to Xiaomi.

According to Securities Times, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun recruited one of the key developers of the DeepSeek open source large model DeepSeek-V2, Luo Fuli, with a million-yuan annual salary to lead the Xiaomi AI large model team.

Public information shows that Luo Fuli studied computer science at Beijing Normal University for her undergraduate degree and computational linguistics at Peking University for her master’s degree. In 2019, while still pursuing her master’s degree at Peking University, she published 8 papers (including 2 as the first author) at the top international conference ACL in the field of artificial intelligence, which made her a hot topic on Zhihu. Luo Fuli responded with her Zhihu account, stating, ‘This submission to ACL is the result of my efforts in the past year, so I believe that I have put in enough effort, although luck may have played a role as well.’

After obtaining a master’s degree, Luo Fuli first joined Alibaba DAMO Academy to conduct research on artificial intelligence and work on pre-training language models. She was responsible for the AliceMind open-source project at Alibaba DAMO Academy and led the development of the multilingual pre-training model VECO. In 2022, Luo Fuli joined Magic Cube Quantitative to work on deep learning strategy modeling and algorithm research. Later, she moved to DeepSeek as a deep learning researcher, participating in the development of the MoE large model DeepSeek-V2.

In May of this year, after the release of DeepSeek-V2, Luo Fuli wrote an article on Zhihu expressing her views on DeepSeek-V2. She said, ‘In terms of the Chinese level of the DeepSeek-V2 model, it is truly in the top tier of closed-source models both domestically and abroad,’ and ‘In addition, at a price of 1 yuan per million input tokens, it is the king of cost performance, at only 1/100 the price of GPT-4.’

Xiaomi makes a big move! It is reported to build a GPU ten thousand card cluster

In fact, the hiring of Rofuli with a high salary into Xiaomi is one of the actions taken by Xiaomi to fully develop AI large models. In April 2023, Xiaomi officially established the AI Lab Large Model Team, and stated that it will continue to explore AI-related user scenarios, leverage its own technical advantages, and open up more opportunities with an open attitude and cooperation partners.

In November this year, Xiaomi established a dedicated AI platform department, with Zhang Duo, a veteran technical expert at Xiaomi, as the head. Zhang Duo, who graduated with a bachelor’s and master’s degree from the Department of Computer Science at Tsinghua University, was publicly praised by Lei Jun as the “great god of Xiaomi,” and was given the title of “Duo Shen.”

Just search on the official page of Xiaomi recruitment, and you can find as many as 59 positions related to large models in the Beijing area alone.

Increase investment in AI and computing power, research and development costs exceed 100 billion yuan in five years.

In addition to recruiting talents, Xiaomi is currently building a GPU cluster with tens of thousands of cards, which is significantly larger than the approximately 6500 GPUs when the large-scale model team was established. This plan has been implemented for several months and is personally led by Lei Jun, the chairman of the group. In response to this, a reporter from 21st Century Business Herald contacted relevant personnel from Xiaomi for verification, but they did not respond.

Xiaomi President Lu Weibing revealed that R&D expenses are expected to reach 24 billion yuan in 2024 and climb to 30 billion yuan in 2025.

He expects that Xiaomi’s R&D investment will exceed 100 billion yuan in the five years from 2022 to 2026, mainly focusing on the research and development of AI, OS, and chip three underlying technologies.

In terms of AI team building, since 2016, Xiaomi has expanded its AI team several times, and the scale of personnel in related fields has reached more than 3000 people.

Xiaomi’s stock price hits a new high! Lei Jun speaks out

On the secondary market, increasing AI computing power is the main driving factor for Xiaomi’s recent rise. In addition, on December 28th, @Xiaomi Automotive announced that the total annual delivery volume of Xiaomi SU7 has exceeded 130,000 units so far, and all annual targets have been completed ahead of schedule.

On December 27, 2024, Xiaomi’s stock price hit a new high since 2022, reaching HK$34.95 per share during the trading day.

Lei Jun once said in a public speech that Xiaomi’s approach to large models is different from many other companies. The main breakthroughs are lightweight and local deployment. For Xiaomi, a company that emphasizes ‘cost-effectiveness’ in both mobile phones and car manufacturing, balancing costs in the money-burning large model business is undoubtedly the core issue Lei Jun considers. And perhaps this is also why Luo Fuli, who has a background in DeepSeek-V2 research and development, has been recognized by Lei Jun.

Xiaomi Group’s financial report shows that in the third quarter of this year, Xiaomi Group achieved a total revenue of 92.5 billion yuan, an increase of 30.5% year-on-year; achieved an adjusted net profit of 6.3 billion yuan, an increase of 4.4% year-on-year. In the third quarter, innovative businesses such as Xiaomi Smart Electric Vehicles achieved a revenue of 9.7 billion yuan, with a gross profit margin increasing by 1.7 percentage points to 17.1%, and the net loss continued to narrow to 1.5 billion yuan.

Lei Jun may appear on the New Year’s Eve party

On December 29th, @Bilibili New Year’s Eve Party announced that the New Year’s Eve Party will start on the evening of December 31st, and also released a poster of a “mysterious guest”, with a “OK” gesture on the poster.

Bilibili leaves a suspense: “Who is the mysterious guest in the last place?” And hinted that the guest is the “treasure of the station.” Sharp-eyed netizens found that the “OK” gesture on the poster of the “mysterious guest” is the “Are You OK” valve core cap launched by Xiaomi CEO Lei Jun this year.

Netizens in the comments section have said, 'This must be Lei Jun’s ‘Are You OK?’

What do you think of Lei Jun’s multimillion-dollar salary to recruit AI talents? Feel free to comment.

(Source: 21st Century Business Herald)

Source: Eastmoney.com

Author: 21st Century Business Herald