Xiaomi has its own AI model that rivals Claude and GPT-5.4! You can download it for free, but there's a catch

Xiaomi is no longer just a brand of smartphones and robotic vacuum cleaners – the Chinese giant is quietly but systematically building its own AI portfolio. The latest endeavor is the large language model MiMo-V2.5, which aims to compete with the best artificial intelligence available today. The key message, however, is not in the benchmarks themselves, but in the fact that anyone can download and run it at home.

Good numbers, but with a caveat

Xiaomi presents MiMo-V2.5 as a model with 310 billion total parameters (of which 15 billion are active), trained on a massive 48 trillion tokens. A more robust variant, MiMo-V2.5-Pro, with a trillion parameters, is also available. In published benchmarks, the model performs at the level of top closed competitors – in image understanding tests (CharXiv RQ, MMMU-Pro, HR-Bench), it challenges Gemini 3 Pro and GPT-5.4, in some cases even surpassing them.

However, a healthy dose of skepticism is necessary here. The benchmarks are published by the manufacturer itself, who naturally selects those where it performs well. Furthermore, GPT-5.4 or Gemini 3 Pro are conspicuously absent from some graphs – it’s hard to say whether this is due to the unavailability of comparable results or simply marketing selectivity. Independent tests, which will appear in the coming weeks, will provide a more realistic picture.

Open-source as a Chinese strategy

More important than the numbers themselves, however, is one thing: MiMo-V2.5 is an open-weight model. This means that anyone can download it from the Hugging Face platform and run it locally, or even build their own service on top of it. With this approach, Xiaomi fits into a broader Chinese trend led by DeepSeek, Kimi, Qwen, and others.

The strategy is clearly visible. While American companies like OpenAI or Anthropic lock their models behind APIs and subscriptions, Chinese firms release them to the world for free. In the long run, this could be more transformative for the global AI scene than any single benchmark. Developer communities gain access to models at the level of expensive proprietary services, which lowers entry barriers and accelerates innovation. The question, of course, remains who will actually use these open models in the future – and who will profit from it.

You won’t easily try it at home (unless you have a Mac Studio)

For the average user, MiMo-V2.5 has one major catch – you can’t run it on a regular computer. The model’s size exceeds the memory limits of even the best consumer graphics cards, including the Nvidia RTX 5090. For local operation, you need a powerful Mac Studio with sufficient unified memory or a server solution, which costs hundreds of thousands of Czech crowns.

For most interested parties, the official AI Studio or a paid API remains, where the model is available at relatively friendly rates. Whether Xiaomi will integrate some MiMo features into HyperOS and its own AI functions in phones remains to be seen. It would be logical – the company has a number of self-developed AI features, so moving to its own LLM would be a natural step. If this happens, it will first appear on the Chinese market; AI based on MiMo will likely arrive in the global version of HyperOS later.

Do you follow the development of AI models from Chinese companies, or do you stick with established players?

Source: GSMArena