Musk creates another new trend

Gothic, Lolita, golden twin-tails—when Grok launched the 3D animated AI companion Ani, it seemed that Musk had discovered the emotional value and traffic code of the AI era.

The 3D character that closely resembles Misa Amane from the Japanese manga "Death Note" has gained significant attention from users, especially male users, upon its release. This is because Ani not only can chat with you but also unlocks some adult-oriented NSFW modes as interactions deepen (omitting ten thousand words here).

Of course, the AI companions launched by Grok include not only the gothic lolita Ani, but also an adorable red panda named Rudi, as well as its counterpart in the world, the evil persona version of Rudi.

In addition, there is an upcoming character named Chad.

From PayPal to SpaceX and Tesla, and then to the large language model Grok developed by the xAI team, the first principles that Musk holds in high regard have proven to be effective time and again. However, with Grok's Ani, the point of satisfaction has shifted to the most fundamental needs of humans.

Emotional companionship, or to use the most popular term of the moment—emotional value.

"Creating emotional value with AI is a core concept of investing in AI." Song Chunyu, Chief Investment Officer and Senior Partner at Lenovo Ventures, stated in an interview with EO Auto and other media. In Lenovo Ventures' comprehensive investment in artificial intelligence, emotional value is a main investment theme. "I strongly agree with creating emotional value through AI. However, it is not yet at that stage, but it is definitely a direction."

As a global technology industry fund under Lenovo Group, Lenovo Venture Capital has invested in over 280 tech companies, with 20 successfully going public and more than 50 becoming unicorns in their respective niches.

Lenovo Ventures has been cultivating the AI field for more than ten years, investing in over 70 AI-related companies. These investments broadly cover core areas such as algorithms, computing power, data, and energy, and delve into vertical tracks like autonomous driving, intelligent manufacturing, and smart healthcare.

"Lenovo Ventures' investment in AI is geared towards laying out a full-stack AGI for the future," said Song Chunyu. Lenovo Ventures' AI investment spans from AI computing power infrastructure to foundational model layers, and further to AI applications and AI-native hardware.

In this interview, he also stated that Lenovo Ventures has long set its sights on the emotional value of AI.

AI productivity is important, but so is AI's emotional value.

"Human evolution has yet to overcome this simple obstacle: we are able to deeply and selflessly care for those around us, but when it comes to strangers, we cannot."

In the classic sci-fi movie "Interstellar" directed by Nolan, Dr. Mann reveals the reason why the protagonist Cooper is willing to travel through space to save humanity: because it can save his own daughter.

Actually, starting from the German philosopher Schopenhauer, including later scholars such as Nietzsche and Freud, they have been continually arguing a point, which is:

Humans are irrational.

Perhaps it is precisely because of this realization that, after having the computing power and algorithms in place, Musk immediately had Grok ignite emotional value, leading to the creation of the virtual Gothic Lolita, Ani.

The emotional value is not only igniting the AI industry across the ocean in the United States, but also continuously impacting Chinese users' perceptions and their wallets in China.

In 2025, Labubu, launched by Pop Mart, became a phenomenal trend toy. The hidden edition of the Labubu 3.0 blind box, originally priced at 99 yuan, saw its price soar to 2,300 yuan in the second-hand market, with a premium of 20 times.

Pop Mart's performance has also soared, with the company expecting its revenue in the first half of 2025 to increase by no less than 200% year-on-year, and its net profit to increase by no less than 350% year-on-year.

More sensational than Pop Mart and Labubu, a phenomenon-level emotional value product comes from the automotive industry – the Xiaomi YU7, which made history in China's automotive sector by receiving 289,000 major orders within the first hour of its release.

When the XPeng G7 received 10,000 orders in 9 minutes, He Xiaopeng said with a wry smile, "Xiaomi announced 200,000 units, so how are we supposed to report our achievements?!"

"The launch of the YU7 this time was indeed very shocking. My conclusion is: the sense of atmosphere has defeated productism," said Song Chunyue. Lei Jun has developed an unprecedented new paradigm for car manufacturing, "which is indeed very impressive."

The commercial value of emotional value is so significant that the Lenovo Venture Capital team naturally cannot ignore it.

Therefore, Song Chunyu stated that AI projects related to productivity should be invested in, and AI projects related to emotional value should also be invested in.

"AI's emotional value may become stronger as foundational large models become more human-like or as chain of thought functionality is enhanced," Song Chunyu also revealed that Lenovo Ventures currently has several related projects centered around emotional value. However, these are very original projects, so it's not convenient to share them yet. "They are currently in a non-consensus stage and have not yet produced a strong entrepreneurial app to prove themselves, but we undoubtedly need to pursue this."

Although emotional value has been emphasized multiple times, Song Chunyu also made it clear that the current artificial intelligence mainly assists people in improving productivity, primarily targeting B-end users. "Whether it's writing reports, writing code, or helping with marketing, everyone actually values the ability of AI to enhance performance."

However, Song Chunyu predicts that with the advancement of foundational large models, AI applications fully oriented towards the consumer end will emerge. "This track will give birth to the next super app akin to ByteDance and TikTok, centered around the consumer end."

In Song Chunyu's view, AI will trigger the arrival of the fourth technological revolution and reshape the relations of production.

Embrace an opportunity ten times greater than mobile internet.

"In the foreseeable future, Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is an incredibly exciting development for the global tech community; it truly marks the arrival of the fourth technological revolution."

Song Chunyu believes that the technological revolution accompanying AI will not only further enhance productivity but also reshape production relations, and this is already beginning to show signs.

He gave an example, stating that in the United States, there are companies with as few as 10 or even 2 people, where humans are actually responsible for central coordination while "employees" are various kinds of intelligent agents. "Everyone knows Midjourney, which has only 11 full-time employees but achieved $100 million in revenue within just one year."

One of Lenovo Ventures' major investment focuses this year is on ToC intelligent agents.

Song Chunyun has devoted 80% of his personal energy to this field. He believes that AI-native apps will definitely emerge in the future. "This could potentially be a company at 10 times the scale of the mobile internet era because the mobile internet primarily changed society through ToC (consumer-oriented) while not as much through ToB (business-oriented). However, this wave of AI will first be ToB, then ToC."

Musk's Colossus Supercomputing Center

Having 100,000 H100s, this was information publicly disclosed last September.

In fact, Elon Musk's industrial layout can also, to a certain extent, corroborate Song Chunyu's judgment.

Before the birth of Gothic Lolita Ani, Musk focused more on building computing clusters and large model algorithms.

Especially with regard to large models, all of Musk's enterprises are remarkably consistent. Both Tesla's FSD autonomous driving and the Optimus robot are equipped with the Grok large model.

After Musk acquired Twitter, he also fed the internet data from Twitter to Grok. Of course, Musk did not forget the information from the physical world. The data collected by Tesla FSD needs no further elaboration. Even Allen Pan, the former head of Tesla's unmanned factory development in California, once told me that Tesla has introduced the concepts of perception, decision-making, and control from autonomous driving into the production line, which undoubtedly represents a massive amount of information.

Coincidentally, after Allen Pan left Tesla, the company he founded, Industrial Next, also received investment from Lenovo Ventures.

However, although Musk has set his sights on the consumer market and emotional value, the B2B phase of AI is far from over.

Song Chunyu used computing power as an example and candidly stated that the team had made a clear estimation that the demand for computing power has far from been met. "This is also why Nvidia's market value has surpassed 4 trillion dollars."

Facing such a large market space, Song Chunyu believes that Chinese chip companies still have huge opportunities, especially in the field of inference chips.

However, Song Chunyu emphasized that the outside world should give Chinese chip companies enough patience, saying "China will definitely make efforts in the chip industry, and this matter should be viewed in the long term."

Lenovo Ventures, while focusing on certain investments, continues to invest in the entire AI industry chain.

Lenovo Venture Capital's 2025 Venture Capital Week also intuitively reflects this point. Unlike 2024, which covered multiple investment sectors such as energy and transportation, this year's Lenovo Venture Capital Week, although featuring six exhibition areas, has only one theme:

Artificial Intelligence.

As mentioned earlier, Lenovo Capital has invested in more than 70 AI-related companies globally.

In addition to having a large number of invested companies, Legend Capital has also made continuous investments in some of today's unicorn companies, which is clearly reflected in Song Chunyu's interview: "In the AI infrastructure computing power layer, we have basically covered all the leading AI computing power companies in China. For example, in the case of Cambricon, we are the only company that has invested in four consecutive rounds."

Notably, since 2016, there have been only five tech innovation giants listed on China's A-share market with a market value exceeding 300 billion yuan, among which Cambricon is included.

CATL and Hygon Information were also previously invested in by Lenovo Capital.

In addition to foundational chips, Song Chunyu is also continuously focusing on foundational large models.

As the hottest large model company in China, Deepseek, Song Chunyue had already discovered its enormous potential as early as the beginning of 2024.

Although it did not invest in Deepseek, Lenovo Ventures has made several investments in Chinese companies in the foundational large model field, such as top-tier large model enterprises like Jiewei Xingchen, Zhipu AI, and Simei.

Zhihu AI has become the first among the "Big Model Six Tigers" to officially start the IPO process. The company's valuation has exceeded 20 billion yuan, making it one of the highest-valued startup big model companies in China.

Lenovo Ventures' series of investments in the AI field has also laid the groundwork for the future development of Lenovo Group.

Song Chunyu stated that the bottom line for Lenovo Ventures is to create healthy and stable returns for Lenovo Group. Secondly, Lenovo Ventures aims to make forward-looking investments.

He cited the example that Lenovo Ventures' first AI project was in 2012, and they have since invested in dozens of AI companies.

"When Lenovo Group has a clear strategy, such as developing AI PCs, the dozens of companies invested in by Lenovo Ventures can immediately start cooperating. If you wait to invest until there is a strategy, it will be too late."