A powerful artificial intelligence model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week has been revealed to be from Chinese smartphone and EV giant Xiaomi, after it fuelled 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 US 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, said on Wednesday Hunter Alpha was an "early internal test build of MiMo-V2-Pro," a 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.

Xiaomi's release comes at a ⁠time when OpenClaw, an open-source agent framework, is being rapidly adopted by users of all stripes in China.

"I call ⁠this a quiet ambush – not because ⁠we planned it but because the shift from chat to agent paradigm happened so fast, even we barely believed it," Luo said in an X post on Thursday.

"People ask why we move so fast. I saw it first-hand building DeepSeek ⁠R1."

The Hunter Alpha chatbot described itself as "a Chinese AI model primarily trained in Chinese" and said its data extended back to May 2025, the same knowledge cutoff point that was reported by DeepSeek's own chatbot.

When asked about its creator, however, the system declined to identify its developer.

"I only know my name, my parameter scale and my context window length," the chatbot said.

Hunter Alpha's profile ⁠page describes it as a one-trillion-parameter model, meaning it was trained using roughly one trillion adjustable values that determine how the system processes language and generates responses.

The system also advertises a context window of up to one million tokens, a measure of how much text an AI model can process or remember during a single interaction.

A token roughly corresponds to a short piece of text, such as part of a word.

"The combination that stood out was Hunter Alpha's one-million-token context paired with reasoning capability and free access," said Nabil Haouam, an engineer who builds AI agent systems.

"Most frontier models with that context window come with real cost at scale," he added.

Those specifications resembled expectations in local media for DeepSeek's next-generation V4 model, which Chinese outlets have reported could launch as ⁠early as April. (Reuters)


Edited by Tony Sabine