Masayoshi Son is all-in on AI

SoftBank's Masayoshi Son is dreaming big AI dreams.

The SoftBank Group CEO, who made a great deal of his fortune through early bets on Internet companies such as Yahoo and Alibaba, says he wants to reinvent SoftBank as the world's number-one AI company.

In a typically ebullient presentation in Tokyo Wednesday, Son said he believed that AGI (artificial general intelligence) – where AI overtakes human mental capacities – would become a reality within 10 years.

He acknowledged he was the only one to say so publicly and that it was based on his own belief rather than a view of experts, many of whom are skeptical.

But he said he wanted SoftBank Group "to use AI more than anybody else in the world."

"I am the head of the group and I have that strong belief. So that's why Softbank is at the starting point of a further evolution to have further growth."
The 66-year-old entrepreneur has fully embraced the technology himself. He said he has filed 900 generative AI patent applications and regularly conducts debates on AI issues through characters he has created on ChatGPT.

"AGI is not your enemy. It's your best partner, the strongest and the most reliable partner. You should believe in that and then evolve with it."

AI phone

Among his recent AI moves, Son is leading a new $280 million funding round in US mapping firm Mapbox and is reportedly in talks with iPhone designer Sir Jony Ive and Open AI's Sam Altman about developing an "artificial intelligence phone" using Arm.

Arm, which runs on cloud, edge and devices, is a big part of the AI push. SoftBank raised nearly $5 billion from the Arm IPO last month and still owns around 90% of the company.

Arm CEO Rene Haas told the event Arm products were capable of running on everything from Nvidia's Grace Hopper chip and big cloud servers down to devices. Its advantage was the energy efficiency of its products, he said, citing an AI-based smart traffic system in Seoul that runs for long periods on battery.

Energy efficiency is also the priority for SoftBank Corp, the Japan-based telco, which is responsible for building out the domestic compute infrastructure.

CEO Junichi Miyakawa said the company estimated that Japan's total computer processing requirement would increase from 6 exaflops in 2020 to 1.6 zettaflops in 2040.

That would require 580 large thermal power stations – impossible in a small country like Japan – and a tenfold increase in data-center energy efficiency, he said.

Miyakawa pointed to China's huge 'east-west' distributed computing project and said SoftBank was building out one of its own, with data centers being built in rural areas away from Tokyo and Osaka.

He described it as a layered architecture, with less latency-sensitive applications processed in Hokkaido and Kyushu, and low-latency services such as robots and autonomous driving running in edge facilities in the cities.

"We need to coexist with AI. And what we need is to distribute the computing platform and to develop renewable energies to run computing platforms globally. Without this we cannot coexist with AI in Japan," he said.