The Chinese AI model DeepSeek has gained global popularity recently, bringing attention to a figure dubbed the "genius AI girl" Fuli Luo, born post-1995.
According to The Securities Times, Xiaomi founder Jun Lei personally offered an annual salary of tens of millions of CNY to recruit Luo, one of the key developers behind the open-source model DeepSeek-V2, to join Xiaomi's AI large model team.
Chengdu Economic Daily cited an insider, stating that Luo entered the Academy for Discovery, Adventure, Momentum, and Outlook (DAMO Academy) through Alibaba's star project which is similar to Huawei's "Genius Youth" program. The candidates selected through this project are among the best of the best.
In 2019, as a master's student at Peking University, Luo published eight papers (two as the lead author) at the Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, becoming a trending topic on Zhihu. Her methods for word sense disambiguation and text style transfer frameworks significantly advanced NLP technology, earning her the title of "genius AI girl."
That year, Luo chose to join DAMO Academy's machine intelligence lab, where she led the development of the multilingual pre-training model VECO. She also spearheaded the open-source efforts for AliceMind.
In 2022, Luo switched careers to join High-Flyer, focusing on deep learning-related strategy modeling and algorithm research. She later moved to DeepSeek as a deep learning researcher, participating in the development of the MoE large model DeepSeek-V2.
DeepSeek, backed by High-Flyer and established in April 2023, is a startup focused on developing advanced large language models (LLMs) and related technologies, contributing to the development of DeepSeek-V2. A significant highlight of the DeepSeek-V2 is its cost-effectiveness. Luo stated that it costs only 1 yuan (US$0.14) per million input tokens, just 1/100th the price of GPT-4. After the release of DeepSeek-V2, Luo shared her insights on Zhihu, which may have caught Xiaomi's attention.
On the first anniversary of Xiaomi Auto's debut, Lei announced that the Xiaomi SU7 has delivered a total of 130,000 new cars over the past nine months. This delivery speed surpasses all previous new car manufacturers. However, Lei has even grander plans for AI, and the recruitment of Luo at a multi-million yuan salary raises questions regarding what kind of support she will bring.
At the same time, maintaining financial balance amid ongoing investments in both the automotive and AI sectors will test Lei's wisdom.
Article translated by Charlene Chen
