Why Masa Son Calls His Career a Warm-Up for AI

Masayoshi Son, founder, chairman and CEO of SoftBank, interviewed by Christine Anderson (Inside Blackstone)

Masayoshi Son founded SoftBank in 1981 with the proceeds from an electronic translator he sold as a student at UC Berkeley. He backed Alibaba, Yahoo and Arm and later started the Vision Fund. SoftBank now holds the largest stake in OpenAI and invests across AI chips, models, data centers and robotics.

Summary

Son says everything he has done so far was a warm-up for AI, which he expects to be 10,000 times smarter than people within a decade. He opposes slowing down and wants AI agents taught good intent, in the way traffic rules were written for cars. SoftBank owns large stakes across the AI stack, with more than 30 robotics companies in its portfolio, and Son uses AI three hours a day on weekdays as a thought partner. His advice is to think big, because the result is proportionate to the dream. These signals are from an interview that Christine Anderson did with Masayoshi Son on Inside Blackstone.

1. A Fifty-Year Warm-Up. Son says everything he did before AI, including Alibaba, Yahoo, Arm and the Vision Fund, was "tiny, tiny things" and a warm-up. He dates his conviction to age 17, when he saw the first photograph of a microprocessor in a magazine and cried on the street, sure it would change the future of mankind. He predicted it would take about 50 years for microprocessors to become smarter than people's brains, and he says it has now been 50 years. The brainpower now sits in data centers. ▶ 8:21
2. Ten Thousand Times Smarter. Son says that if AI becomes 10,000 times smarter than people, within a decade in his view, the debate is over. An AI that smart starts inventing new technology by itself. He expects the change to reach the physical world as well as the virtual one, as intelligence moves into the brains of robots. ▶ 10:27