Key Points
- SoftBank’s Masayoshi Son believes AI will become 10,000 times smarter than humans in 10 years.
- He is positioning SoftBank to be a central player through massive investments in companies like Arm and OpenAI.
- This is a long-held personal vision for Son, who has been thinking about AI and robotics for over a decade.
- The big push follows a difficult period where the Vision Fund’s losses caused SoftBank to miss the initial AI boom.
SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son is making his biggest and most personal bet yet: that artificial intelligence will fundamentally change the world, and his company will be at the center of it. He has boldly predicted that artificial superintelligence (ASI)—AI that is 10,000 times smarter than humans—will arrive within 10 years.
This isn’t a new idea for Son, who has been talking about machine intelligence overtaking human intelligence for years. Now, he’s putting his money where his mouth is, hoping to replicate the massive success of his early $20 million investment in Alibaba. “I think I was born to realize ASI,” Son said last year, underscoring the personal nature of his mission.
To achieve this, SoftBank has been on an aggressive investment spree. The company’s biggest plays include chip designer Arm, now valued at over $145 billion, and a planned $32.7 billion investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI. Son’s strategy is to build a complete AI ecosystem, from the chips that power it to the software and applications that will use it.
This vision comes after a rocky period for Son and SoftBank. His massive Vision Fund racked up billions in losses from bad bets on companies like WeWork.
Some analysts believe his focus on areas like ride-hailing as the first wave of AI was simply too early. This “bad timing” put SoftBank in “defense mode,” causing it to miss out on investing in the first wave of the current generative AI boom.
Despite past mistakes and the high risks of the fast-moving AI industry, Son is now fully focused on what he sees as the next great technological shift, determined to ensure SoftBank is a dominant force in the AI-powered future.
