Chinese tech company Xiaomi Corp said on Monday night that it will invest 20 billion yuan into research and development this year, as CEO Lei Jun sees the efforts to crack the high-end market as "the only way for Xiaomi to grow and as a battle of life and death".

Lei Jun, CEO of Xiaomi, said at a speech in Beijing that the company will beef up R&D push to grow its presence in the premium segment, after years of hard work in exploring how to better sharpen its technological strengths in areas such as mobile imaging.

According to Lei, Xiaomi now has over 32,000 authorized patents globally, and it accounts for 4.1 percent of the global 5G-standard essential patent families.

"Xiaomi fully embraces the research on AI large langue model, and the latest 1.3-billion-parameter model has successfully run locally on mobile phones, with some scenarios comparable to the 6-billion-parameter model running in the cloud," Lei said.

He said the company's voice-activated AI assistant has been upgraded to support a large language model and will start inviting users to participate in tests from Monday.

The senior executive said Xiaomi has been engaged in research of AI since July, 2016. And the company established a team in April this year for the research and development of a large language model. Now it has over 3,000 employees working on AI related research.

On Monday night, the company unveiled its latest foldable smartphone, the Mix Fold 3 series, in its latest push to expand presence in the premium segment.