China AI researcher rises to Xiaomi’s top level in 10 months, talks work-life balance

Beijing-based smartphone and electric vehicle giant Xiaomi announced in mid-October that it would promote 31-year-old Luo Fuli to its highest-level position, once again putting the “AI prodigy” at the centre of heated discussion.

The move came 10 months after Luo joined the company as head of its large language model (LLM) unit.

Luo attracted significant public attention in late 2024, when Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun said during a live-stream that he hoped to hire her at an annual salary of 10 million yuan (US$1.5 million), the 21st Century Business Herald reported.

At the time, Luo was little known to the general public. But she had shot to fame in the computer science community in 2019, when, as a master’s degree candidate at Peking University (PKU), she was listed as an author on eight papers presented at the Association for Computational Linguistics’ (ACL) annual meeting.