Xiaomi closes six-day livestreamed training run with over 20 million yuan spent and the open-source top spot

A six-day training experiment by Xiaomi, billed as a 'training livestream,' wrapped up and was reported on September 22 by the Chinese outlet QbitAI. The whole run was shown to viewers from the start of training to the final settlement, and the bill came to more than 20 million yuan.

The result was striking as well: once training finished, Xiaomi's model held the top spot among open-source models, and Hugging Face's CEO publicly praised the run as 'great,' the report says.

Broadcasting an entire training run is itself a statement. Open-source communities usually see only the final weights and a technical report; how much compute gets burned and how a run is driven forward day by day normally stays inside the team. Here the cost and the process were exposed together.

For the open-source ecosystem, the more interesting change is positional. The gap between open-source models and the closed frontier has been debated for two years. The top of the open-source table is no longer just a technical ranking; it shapes which weights downstream companies treat as their default base.

Xiaomi's entry adds a player from consumer electronics and smart hardware to the race. Companies like this have devices, user scenarios and a direct channel into hardware and system software, so choosing to open-source means releasing part of that capability to the wider community.

The other side of the story is cost. A bill above 20 million yuan for six days is a blunt reminder that competitive frontier training remains expensive, and any open-source effort that wants to iterate at this intensity has to answer where the compute comes from and whether the spending can be sustained.

The concrete things to watch next: how open the weights and licence turn out to be, whether third parties can reproduce the gains from this run, and whether the approach grows from a livestream experiment into a durable model service and product capability.