Has AI Become Too Easy? What MiMo-V2 Flash Reveals About the New Reality of AI Progress

The article discusses the release of MiMo-V2 Flash by Xiaomi and how it raises the question of whether AI progress has become too easy. The author argues that while progress looks smooth, the underlying reality is that the hard work has shifted to a different layer, with a focus on efficiency, cost, and scalability rather than just raw intelligence gains.

Details

The article discusses the release of MiMo-V2 Flash by Xiaomi, which the author sees as a sign that the AI industry has grown up. The model's mixture-of-experts architecture, massive parameter count, and emphasis on inference speed reflect a mature understanding of where real-world AI bottlenecks now lie. This is not an experimental lab model, but an industrial system optimized for deployment, cost control, and responsiveness. The author argues that progress in AI has become standardized, with the focus shifting from research breakthroughs to systematic, incremental, and fiercely competitive advances. The hard work has simply moved to a different layer, with a focus on efficiency, cost, and scalability rather than just raw intelligence gains. The author is more concerned about the risk of AI progress becoming too homogeneous, with many models trained on similar data and optimized for similar benchmarks, making genuine differentiation harder. The real innovation may lie in how such models are embedded into products, services, and daily workflows. From a societal perspective, the author argues that faster and cheaper intelligence lowers barriers but also amplifies power, with companies controlling platforms, distribution, and data benefiting disproportionately.