For months, SoftBank founder and chief executive Masayoshi Son remained silent as his tech conglomerate grappled with huge investment losses.
But as the world races to adopt artificial intelligence – something that has long fascinated him – Mr Son has used his company annual shareholder meeting Wednesday publicly, and memorably, restore your commitment To be a leader in cutting edge technology.
“We are ready to go into offensive mode,” Mr. Son told investors and analysts, “I want SoftBank to lead the AI revolution.” reviving the kind of grand productions that he had long supported – who can forget “Valley of the Coronavirus” Slide In 2020, featuring the Flying Unicorn? – The SoftBank chief began by asking, “What is mankind?,
The answer, apparently, is something the technology behind chatbots could benefit from, which has already sparked a flurry of investment. (To be fair, the potential of AI was one of several central theses behind SoftBank’s $100 billion First Vision Fund.)
“When your grandchildren are our age, I believe they will be living in a reality where computers are 10,000 times smarter than the sum of all human knowledge,” he said on Wednesday. SoftBank would fit in, he said, as “an architect for building the future of mankind”.
Tech industry leaders have warned that AI systems could one day pose a potential threat to humanity and have called for an international watchdog to regulate AI technology.
Mr. Son argues that better days are ahead for SoftBank. Although the company’s Vision Fund has suffered big paper losses amid a collapse in start-up valuations, he said SoftBank had more than $35 billion in cash in “defense mode” and was ready to invest it . (The company is also set to benefit from the upcoming initial public offering of Arm, which owns the chip designer.)
And Mr. Son said he was upbeat again after being sober last year. “There were times when I felt very empty,” he told investors. “‘Is this enough? Is this what?’ I cried and cried and couldn’t stop crying for days. Now, he said, “I’m having so much fun.”
