Xiaomi and MiMo: a smartphone maker building its own AI models

An electronics giant joins the race

Xiaomi was founded in Beijing in 2010. First known for keenly priced smartphones, the group expanded into connected devices, smart homes and then electric cars. Its AI team, Xiaomi MiMo, develops foundation models with a stated ambition: to make AI a universal smart platform that serves everyone. It sums up its philosophy this way: intelligence lies in prediction and compression.

The MiMo family

MiMo models span several areas:

• large language models (V2, V2.5 and V2.6 generations) geared toward reasoning, coding and AI agents;
• vision models (MiMo-VL) that can analyze images;
• audio, text-to-speech and speech-recognition models.

Recent language models use a mixture-of-experts design: they contain a huge number of parameters but activate only a fraction at each step, which speeds up responses. Some handle long context, which helps when analyzing large documents or entire codebases.

Open weights under the MIT license

Xiaomi publishes its MiMo models as open weights on Hugging Face under the XiaomiMiMo organization. The model cards for MiMo-V2-Flash and MiMo-V2.5-Pro list the MIT license, one of the most permissive: downloading, modifying and commercial use are all allowed. That sets Xiaomi apart from many large tech groups that keep their models closed. Smaller distilled versions also exist and are easier to run on modest hardware. Keep in mind that the largest MiMo models still need powerful servers, so for a first test the web demo or the API is the simplest route. If you handle sensitive data, also check where the API processes it before sending anything.

How to access the models

• The web demo at mimo.xiaomi.com, to test without a developer account.
• The Xiaomi MiMo API platform, which offers endpoints compatible with OpenAI-ecosystem tools.
• Downloads from Hugging Face, for deployment with vLLM or SGLang.

To see where MiMo fits among other open models, check our open-source models page or the profile of DeepSeek, another Chinese open-weights player.