(Yicai Global) July 13 -- Lenovo Capital and Incubator Group will continue studying large language models with a more prudent approach as no one knows who will become the dominant market player, according to the industry fund chief of the Chinese personal computer giant.

Basic LLMs could be considered to be a super science and technology project that people spend loads of money on but no one knows how the neural network trained by such models will look like in the end and whether the models created by OpenAI and Google can be surpassed, He Zhiqiang, president of Lenovo Capital, said at a company event this week. Still, the venture capital arm of the world's largest PC maker cannot afford not to join the race. “We are investing in LLMs. It is worth investing in.”

Lenovo Capital is expected to restore its previous pace of investing this year after a slowdown last year due to challenges in the market, according to Wang Guangxi, partner at the firm. The company focuses on hardware projects involving Big Data, extended reality, and robots, but also software applications, new energy, and smart medical care.

Ideas of the future are in flux. Government agencies, internet giants, startups, and artificial intelligence experts were excited when OpenAI's ChatGPT was launched late last year, but there are different opinions on what is the future of LLMs, the limitations, and the investment opportunities they will bring, per Wang.

Entrepreneurs and investors are trying to find out where to start a business or invest to build AI capabilities and industry barriers, Wang said. One of Lenovo Capital's bets is Langboat Technology, a Chinese LLM startup that completed its pre-Series A round financing worth nearly CNY100 million (USD14 million) in February 2022.

Once the superior technology appears, adoption should be quick. It has been proven in the internet era that Chinese firms and talents are very good at applying new technologies, so AI-generated content will be used in many fields rapidly when the technologies develop to a certain degree, Wang said.

Corporate Venture Capital Advantages

Collaboration between startups and established companies is key in accelerating AI development.

As a corporate venture capital arm, Lenovo Capital can seek business partners for its parent, build a win-win ecosystem, and grasp opportunities to apply LLMs through investment, Wang said. Lenovo Capital will have talent and technology exchanges with companies it invests in and even explore deeper capital cooperation such as mergers and acquisitions, the partner added.

The Beijing-based PC maker is a very large potential client for startups, so startups will attach greater importance to the resources that Lenovo Capital can bring to them, per Wang. That is why it is not surprising that around 50 percent of the startups that Lenovo Capital invests in have business partnerships with the parent.

Editors: Tang Shihua, Emmi Laine