Xiaomi Founder Lei Jun Comments on Large-Scale Models and AIGC

On the evening of April 14, Xiaomi founder Lei Jun posted on a Chinese social media platform for the first time about Xiaomi‘s views on large-scale models and AI-generated content (AIGC). He wrote: “Xiaomi has been working in the AI field for many years, with teams such as AI Lab, Xiao Ai voice assistant, and autonomous driving. Of course, we will spare no effort to embrace large-scale models. We are developing some interesting technologies and products, and  will show them to everyone when they are good enough.”

Earlier this month on April 14, according to a report by Chinese media outlet The Paper, Xiaomi issued an internal email appointing Luan Jian as the head of the Large-Scale Model Team at its Technical Committee’s AI Lab. Luan Jian reports to Wang Bin, Vice Chairman of the Technical Committee and Director of AI Lab.

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Public information shows that Luan Jian is currently responsible for Xiaomi‘s AI Lab Speech Generation Team and previously held positions such as Toshiba Research Institute researcher, Microsoft Engineering Institute Senior Speech Scientist, Microsoft Xiaoice Chief Speech Scientist and Head of its Speech Team. Currently, there aren’t many reports about him, but his personal tag on the Chinese Q&A platform Zhihu is “Xiaomi NLP Technology Senior Director.”

After being appointed as the head of Xiaomi‘s Large-Scale Model team, it remains to be seen what unique contributions he can bring with his rich experience in AI speech technology from Microsoft.

It is worth mentioning that during this year’s Xiaomi Investor Day event, regarding their layout on ChatGPT, a language model developed by OpenAI, Xiaomi President Zeng Xuezhong said that ChatGPT was based on large-scale AI models with billions-level parameters supported by data annotation. In terms of large-scale AI models, Xiaomi has always invested heavily into it. There are many scenarios where large-scale AI models have been implemented in mobile phones and automotive businesses.

Later, during the 2022 financial report conference call in March of this year, Xiaomi President William Lu talked about ChatGPT-related issues and said that Xiaomi had made many deployments in large-scale AI models early on and adopted a strategy of parallel multiple technology routes. Xiao Ai voice assistant is representative of Xiaomi‘s implementation of large-scale AI models.

However, it should be noted that there is still a considerable gap between the product capabilities of Xiao Ai voice assistant and ChatGPT trained based on GPT-3.5.