Mystery AI model linked to DeepSeek found to be Xiaomi's
What's the story
A powerful artificial intelligence (AI) model that appeared anonymously on a developer platform last week has been confirmed to be from Chinese tech giant Xiaomi. The revelation was made by the company's AI model team MiMo. The mysterious free model, dubbed Hunter Alpha, surfaced on OpenRouter on March 11 without any developer attribution and was later described as a "stealth model." Many believed that Chinese start-up DeepSeek was quietly testing its next-generation DeepSeek-V4 model ahead of a launch.
Model details
Model meant to be brain of AI agents
MiMo revealed that Hunter Alpha was an "early internal test build of MiMo-V2-Pro." This model is meant to be the "brain" of AI agents, tools that let users perform complex tasks with fewer human prompts and supervision than a chatbot. During tests conducted by Reuters, the Hunter Alpha chatbot described itself as "a Chinese AI model primarily trained in Chinese."
Advanced features
Model has 1 trillion parameters, can process 1 million tokens
Hunter Alpha's profile page describes it as a 1-trillion-parameter model, meaning it was trained using some one trillion adjustable values that determine how the system processes language and generates responses. The system also boasts 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.
Market response
Hunter Alpha topped charts on OpenRouter
Hunter Alpha was quickly adopted after its debut on OpenRouter, surpassing one trillion tokens in total usage and topping the leaderboard charts on the platform. A notice on its profile page said all prompts and completions for the model "are logged by the provider and may be used to improve the model." This highlights an industry-wide practice of using stealth model launches for unbiased feedback.