Mengchen Pine from Aufei Temple
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Xiaomi’s high-level adjustments are still continuing, and another executive has been exposed to leave.
Vice President Cui Baoqiu has successively served as chief architect of Xiaomi, vice president of artificial intelligence and cloud platform, chairman of Xiaomi Group Technical Committee, and general manager of the Group’s Learning and Development Department.
It can be said that when it comes to Xiaomi’s technology research and development, he cannot be avoided.
According to Jiemian News, on December 30, an internal staff letter from Xiaomi stated that Cui Baoqiu had resigned due to personal reasons, and that the Group’s Learning and Development Department (formerly Qinghe University) he was in charge of was merged into the Group’s Human Resources Department.
In the previous week, Xiaomi made a major personnel adjustment. President Wang Xiang resigned and Lu Weibing took over. At the same time, co-founders Hong Feng and Wang Chuan will also withdraw from the front line of business.
From the resignation of Li Wanqiang, Huang Jiangji, and Zhou Guangping in 2018 to 2019, there are very few “entrepreneurs” including the 8 co-founders in Xiaomi, and the “professional managers” represented by Lu Weibing are in the top position.
In this regard, Lei Jun stated in an internal letter:
… For Xiaomi, it is a milestone.
This declares that Xiaomi’s management has achieved a smooth handover iteration and is ready for continuous development in the future.
△Xiaomi founder 8 people
Among them, Cui Baoqiu and a series of changes in the technical committee of Xiaomi Group deserve the attention of the technical circle.
The fourth year of Xiaomi Technical Committee
In the fourth quarter of 2018, the top five in the domestic smartphone market were: Huawei, OPPO, vivo, Apple, and Xiaomi.
Among them, the top three domestic manufacturers have achieved positive growth in shipments, while Xiaomi is the result of a severe decline.
Lei Jun began to mention “technology is a matter of life and death for Xiaomi” in internal meetings.
Shortly after the Spring Festival in 2019, Xiaomi formally established the Group Technical Committee, with Cui Baoqiu in charge.
The main responsibilities of the technical committee include: planning technical directions, pre-researching cutting-edge technologies, establishing technical cooperation with external parties, cultivating technical talents, organizing special technical committees, and building technical culture, etc.
Lei Jun emphasized that this arrangement is to manage 10,000 engineers, strengthen the technical culture and engineer culture, and lead the company to explore future technological trends.
Although Cui Baoqiu did not drink porridge with Lei Jun, he was the best candidate for this position at that time.
He is a classmate of Lei Jun in the computer department of Wuhan University (it is said that he is still in the same dormitory), and has a Ph.D. in computer science from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.
Before joining Xiaomi, Cui Baoqiu was in charge of database research and development at IBM, participated in search engines at Yahoo, and created a distributed search system at LinkedIn.
In 2012, at the invitation of Lei Jun, he returned to China and joined Xiaomi, and formed the Xiaomi artificial intelligence and cloud platform team, including building Xiaomi’s first real machine learning platform, which promoted Xiaomi’s cloud computing-big data-artificial intelligence technology route.
From the early application of search and recommendation systems in Xiaomi’s e-commerce and finance, to the implementation of deep learning technology in mobile phones, cameras, Xiaoai classmates and other products in 2016, he is behind him.
Cui Baoqiu promoted an open source culture within Xiaomi.
Under his leadership, among the 10 committers of the Apache Hbase distributed database in mainland China, 5 came from Xiaomi, which was just a start-up company at that time.
In addition, Cui Baoqiu also recruited Daniel Povey, an international AI voice expert and the father of the open source voice recognition tool Kaldi.
Later, Cui Baoqiu also served as the chairman of the Xiaomi Security and Privacy Protection Committee, and the widely acclaimed MIUI12 “Privacy Flare” function was also made by him.
During Cui Baoqiu’s tenure as the chairman of the technical committee, Xiaomi also launched the “Million Dollar Technology Award”, internally “making engineers the most dazzling stars”, and externally becoming a display window for Xiaomi’s technical image.
Since 2016, AI has become Xiaomi’s core strategy for the next ten years. Cui Baoqiu has publicly stated on many occasions that “Xiaomi can’t invest too much in AI.”
△2018 World Intelligence Conference Intelligent Technology Industry Development CXO Forum
In 2019, together with the establishment of the technical committee, the business weight of the artificial intelligence and cloud platform department, where Cui Baoqiu was the vice president, was increased and divided into three departments.
The Artificial Intelligence Department is responsible for technology research and development in the field of artificial intelligence and Xiaoai products; the Big Data Department is responsible for big data, search and recommendation; the Cloud Platform Department is responsible for cloud technology, Xiaomi Cloud, operation and maintenance, security and privacy.
Among them, Ye Hangjun, who was the general manager of the artificial intelligence department at the time, later became Cui Baoqiu’s successor.
Dr. Ye Hangjun graduated from the Computer Department of Tsinghua University. His research fields include computer vision and image retrieval. Before joining Xiaomi, he worked in IBM, Google, and Tencent.
Ye Hangjun and Cui Baoqiu joined Xiaomi in the same year (2012), responsible for cloud technology. According to late LatePost news, Ye Hangjun “self-recommended” when forming the Artificial Intelligence Department. In addition, he was appointed as the Vice Chairman of the AIoT Strategy Committee.
At the beginning of 2021, just after the Spring Festival, there was news that Xiaomi’s artificial intelligence department and the technical committee had merged. Ye Hangjun became the chairman of the technical committee, and Cui Baoqiu was transferred to the president of Xiaomi Qinghe University.
At that time, the handover also caused speculation from the outside world. Until September, Xiaomi officially announced that it would build a car.
Ye Hangjun was found among the core members of the car manufacturer, and he was personally appointed by Lei Jun as the person in charge of automatic driving.
△The third from the left in the back row is Ye Hangjun
As Xiaomi’s department for planning and pre-researching new technologies, the technical committee is headed by the person in charge of autonomous driving. It shows that Xiaomi has regarded car building as the next strategic decision.
Recent situation of Xiaomi company
The new year has come, and looking back at 2022 is also Xiaomi’s “eventful autumn”.
This year, the market’s demand for smartphones has become increasingly weak, and domestic mobile phone sales have declined severely. Of course, Xiaomi is no exception.
According to Canalys data, in the first half of this year, Xiaomi’s domestic shipments of mobile phones were 21.2 million units, a decrease of nearly 5 million units compared to 26.1 million units in the same period last year.
The world is not optimistic either. In the first half of the year, Xiaomi sold a total of 77.6 million mobile phones, 24.7 million less than the same period in 2021, a drop of about a quarter.
However, despite the overall downturn in the industry, Xiaomi’s mobile phone sales in the third quarter seem to have improved slightly. The global smartphone shipments ranked third, with a market share of 13.6%, and shipments increased for two consecutive quarters.
△Source: Canalys
Of course, the problem facing Xiaomi is not limited to market sales. This year, it has repeatedly suffered setbacks in its international “journey”.
First, it was fined 5.36 billion yuan by India, and then it was hit by the European market. Italy fined Xiaomi more than 20 million yuan for harming consumer rights.
Under the internal and external troubles, there are also news of major layoffs. Later, Xiaomi insiders said that the layoffs were true, but the scale was not that large.
Then came this round of high-level shake-up…
In his internal letter on December 22, Lei Jun not only announced personnel changes, but also mentioned that the group is on the starting line of a new stage:
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In the mobile phone business, the high-end strategy handed over a phased answer sheet for the Mi 13 series
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The progress of the smart electric vehicle business has exceeded expectations, and we are confident in the smooth mass production and launch in the first half of 2024
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Technological innovations continue to emerge, and humanoid robots and intelligent manufacturing systems continue to improve
In March 2021, Xiaomi announced that it will officially enter electric vehicles, planning to invest 10 billion yuan in the first phase and 10 billion US dollars in the next ten years.
According to light cone intelligence news, since the official announcement of building cars, Xiaomi has continued to invest, acquire, and deploy in the automotive industry chain. In the third quarter of this year alone, Xiaomi invested in automotive resistors and lithium battery basic materials through its three major investment platforms. , LED lighting modules, etc., including 8 companies.
According to Tianyancha, this year, Xiaomi has already filed 379 patent applications related to automobiles.
Xiaomi also released the first full-size humanoid bionic robot this year: CyberOne, which is another new achievement after Xiaomi’s bionic four-legged robot dog Cyberdog last year. Lei Jun said that the cost of humanoid robots is about 600,000 to 700,000 yuan, and mass production is not yet possible.
In addition, the construction of the second phase of the smart factory is also in progress. It is planned to be put into operation by the end of 2023, with a planned annual output of 10 million high-end mobile phones.
Finally, it is worth noting that among the personnel changes at the end of 2022, Qu Heng will also serve as the chairman of the technical committee.
Qu Heng, one of the founding team members who drank porridge together. He graduated from Beihang University with a bachelor’s degree and a master’s degree from the Department of Computer Science and Engineering of Harbin Institute of Technology.
Qu Heng used to work at Kingsoft. After joining Xiaomi, he successively took charge of MIUI, Mi Talk software development, and router system engineer. In 2018, he served as the general manager of the ecological chain department of the group, focusing on smart home.
There is no news about the further adjustment of Ye Hangjun, the former chairman of the technical committee and the person in charge of autonomous driving.
Maybe it will be after the Spring Festival again?
(Disclaimer: This article only represents the author’s point of view, not the position of Sina.com.)
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