Xiaomi has officially announced an innovative stride in its AI ambitions by building its own GPU cluster, as reported by Chinese media outlet Jiemian. This strategic move comes as part of Xiaomi's intensified investment in artificial intelligence models aimed at enhancing its product capabilities.

The company’s AI model team was established in April 2023 with an impressive launch of 6,500 GPU resources. At the formation announcement, Xiaomi's CEO Lei Jun underscored the firm’s deep-rooted commitment to AI development, pointing out the significance of their AI Lab, the popular Xiao Ai voice assistant, and teams dedicated to autonomous driving technologies.

During a high-profile annual event later in 2023, Lei shared further insights into the company’s AI model advancements. Notably, the team is concentrating on creating lightweight solutions that can be deployed locally, which is a game-changer in the tech industry. Xiaomi has successfully tested a large AI model featuring 1.3 billion parameters directly on its smartphones. Remarkably, the performance of this model in specific use cases is edging closer to the capabilities of cloud-based models that boast 6 billion parameters!

Furthermore, December 20 marked a key development in Xiaomi’s AI journey with the recruitment of Luo Fuli, a leading developer of the open-source DeepSeek-V2 model, who has now taken the helm of the company's large model initiatives. Since the inception of the AI team in 2016, Xiaomi has dramatically ramped up its workforce in this domain, with the AI division now swelling to over 3,000 skilled professionals adept in a range of disciplines, including computer vision, speech recognition, natural language processing, machine learning, and multimodal AI technologies.

The applications of these cutting-edge capabilities are vast, with integration into Xiaomi’s portfolio of mobile phones, vehicles, AIoT (Artificial Intelligence of Things) devices, and robotic systems. As Xiaomi continues to focus on elevating user experiences through advanced AI technologies, the tech landscape is set for exciting transformations.

Stay tuned as Xiaomi’s AI innovations unfold, potentially reshaping how we interact with technology!