Investing.com-- Xiaomi Corp (HK: 1810 ) on Wednesday debuted its first open-source artificial intelligence large language model, MiMo, joining an increasingly crowded stable of technology giants seeking to gain a foothold in the fast-growing industry.

The launch of the new model saw Xiaomi’s shares surge nearly 5% to HK$50.0 in Hong Kong trade, helping underpin small gains on the Hang Seng .

Xiaomi (OTC: XIACF ) unveiled the model in an announcement, stating that the model is designed specifically for reasoning tasks, making it similar in function to DeepSeek’s R1.

The Chinese tech giant claimed that MiMo outperformed OpenAI’s o1-mini and Alibaba’s QwQ-32B-Preview in mathematical reasoning and coding benchmarks.

Xiaomi said DeepSeek-R1 had triggered a wave of reinforcement learning development in the AI industry. But with the same reinforcement learning training data, Xiaomi claimed that MiMo “has a significantly leading reinforcement learning potential in the field of mathematics & code.”

The move sees Xiaomi joining a cadre of its Chinese tech peers in attempting to gain more market share in the increasingly competitive AI space. So far, Alibaba (NYSE: BABA ), DeepSeek, and TikTok-owner ByteDance lead Chinese markets by user numbers for their AI tools.

China’s new wave of AI development was sparked by DeepSeek’s R1 model earlier this year. The model highlighted China’s AI development capabilities despite a lack of access to advanced hardware, amid strict U.S. controls on tech exports to China.

While Xiaomi does offer AI services through its Xiaomi HyperAI tool, this is largely through a partnership with Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL ) and uses Google’s Gemini AI model.

The Chinese electronics giant has been steadily attempting to diversify beyond its core smartphones and devices business, having recently made a successful foray into electric vehicles with its SU7 lineup.