Mystery AI model suspected to be DeepSeek V4 is revealed to be from Xiaomi

A powerful artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week was revealed on Wednesday to be from Chinese smartphone and EV giant Xiaomi, after it fueled speculation that startup DeepSeek was quietly testing its next-generation system ahead of a launch.



The release of DeepSeek's low-cost models DeepSeek-V3 and R1 triggered a global tech stock selloff last year, causing investors to question whether U.S. AI firms needed to spend billions of dollars on AI computing power. Since then, there has been a great deal of interest in DeepSeek-V4, a next-generation model that has yet to be released.



The mysterious free model, called Hunter Alpha, surfaced on the AI gateway platform OpenRouter on March 11 without any developer attribution and was later described by the platform as a "stealth model."



Xiaomi's AI model team MiMo, run by former DeepSeek researcher Luo Fuli, on Wednesday said that Hunter Alpha was an "early internal test build of MiMo-V2-Pro," a flagship model designed to serve as the "brain" of AI agents, tools that can allow users to execute complex tasks with fewer human prompts and supervision when compared with a chatbot.