Photo credit: SoftBank
Practically everyone is betting on or against AI in one form or another, but Masayoshi Son is probably betting harder than anyone else, and he’s doing it on a scale only he can pull off. As CEO of SoftBank, he’s positioning the company to sit at the center of the global AI kerfuffle, pouring tens of billions into what he calls the coming era of artificial superintelligence (ASI). So definitely smarter than me.
Son has publicly argued that ASI—intelligence far beyond human capability—is close, and he’s restructuring SoftBank to dominate that future. Again, probably without input from me.
His influence also comes from SoftBank’s massive, high-risk, high-reward investment strategy. The company is a major shareholder in OpenAI, with gains from that stake driving huge jumps in SoftBank’s profits and reinforcing Son’s reputation for spotting transformative technologies early.
On top of that, Son controls Arm, the chip architecture that’s currently powering most of the world’s smartphones and is now beginning to encroach on the AI data-center ecosystem. That could give Son massive leverage over both the hardware and software layers of the AI revolution.
