How does a consumer electronics company like Xiaomi launch a world-class super car, and a frontier AI model (AI team only ~300 people)? 🤔
Answer: Massive human capital density in China. Huge numbers of top quality engineers and CS researchers. Comparable to or greater than RoW combined.
Graph below: top-level PhDs, threshold = work accepted a leading AI conference (ICLR, ICML, NeurIPS).
Xiaomi makes this 1500hp EV supercar that holds test track records in Germany, and has just shipped a credible frontier model after a public RL training demo.
Claude says:
Xiaomi is the first major lab to run its production RL in the open. It streamed the run live and disclosed the key numbers: about 750,000 trajectories, 30 steps in under six days, roughly $2.62M for Pro and $0.85M for Flash. It says it's releasing the training environments and RL code so others can reproduce the results.
CodeMidas shows that filtered, verified tasks beat larger unfiltered sets. Open-sourcing such environments lowers the barrier for every open lab and pressures closed labs whose advantage partly rests on proprietary RL data.
V2.6-Pro is the top open-weights model and ties Grok 4.7 at 46 on Artificial Analysis. It still trails Claude Opus 5 (51) and GPT-6 Astra (53), with the widest gaps on hard long-horizon tests like Terminal-Bench 4.0 (34.9 vs 49.0 and 59.6). Its edge is cost: it's roughly 45× cheaper per task than Opus 5.