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SoftBank aims to become top artificial super intelligence platform provider
SoftBank Group CEO Masayoshi Son on Friday said he wants the Japanese technology investment group to become the biggest platform provider for "artificial super intelligence" within the next 10 years.
"We want to become the organiser of the industry in the artificial super intelligence era," Son told shareholders at the group's annual shareholder meeting.
Son likened his aim to the position of dominant technology platform providers such as Microsoft, Amazon and Alphabet's Google, which benefit from a "winner takes all" dynamic.
At previous public appearances Son has described artificial super intelligence as AI technology that is able to exceed human capabilities by a factor of 10,000.
SoftBank has returned to making the aggressive investments that made Son's name, such as an early bet on Alibaba, but that at times spectacularly backfired, like its massive investment in failed shared office provider WeWork.
Its AI-related deals this year include acquiring US semiconductor designer Ampere for $6.5 billion and the underwriting of up to $40 billion of new investment in ChatGPT maker OpenAI.
Son said SoftBank's total agreed investment in OpenAI now stood at $32 billion since first investing in Autumn 2024 and that he regretted not investing earlier. He also said he expected OpenAI to eventually list publicly.
"I'm all in on OpenAI," Son said.
SoftBank had owned around 5 per cent of Nvidia until it sold the stake in 2019, before ChatGPT generated a surge in AI interest at the end of 2022. Nvidia now dominates AI chipmaking and has become one of the world's most valuable companies.
Son's latest spending spree follows years of retrenchment after the high-growth tech startups into which SoftBank had invested billions of dollars through its Vision Fund investment vehicles crashed in value from 2022.
Fortunes changed again when SoftBank raised some $5 billion listing chip designer Arm in September 2023. The rise in the British firm's share price since has boosted the group's assets, against which SoftBank can take out debt to fund new investment.
Son said SoftBank was committed to prudent investment and that, throughout the peaks and troughs, SoftBank has maintained the financial resources and user base such that it can take risks at times.
Earlier in June it raised $4.8 billion from the sale of some shares in T-Mobile. (Only the headline and picture of this report may have been reworked by the Business Standard staff; the rest of the content is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
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Hindustan Times
38 minutes ago
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The Stoic Capitalist: An exclusive excerpt from the book by Wall Street titan Robert Rosenkranz
Every two years, the Whitney Museum in New York showcases works by America's most promising up-and-coming artists in a highly publicized exhibition. Being selected for the Whitney Biennial can transform an artist's life. It brings newcomers to the attention of prominent gallerists looking to add fresh faces to their rosters and to collectors eager to stay abreast of the competition for emerging talent. . However, if you look up the Biennial's catalogs from a decade ago, you will find that most of the artists they heralded now languish in obscurity. Few have important dealers; fewer still have a strong and consistent auction market for their work. Page through Sotheby's and Christie's auction catalogs of contemporary art from a decade ago, and the story is much the same. The art world is in large part a fashion culture, constantly in flux. So, it should be no surprise that investing in art is trickier than, say, buying stocks, and almost always less lucrative. Most contemporary work auctioned a decade ago would not be salable today at a price that could cover the original hammer price, plus the twenty-five percent commission auction houses typically charge, plus the nine percent sales tax a New York resident would have had to pay…not to mention what all this money might have earned over the period in a typical stock market portfolio. There would be notable exceptions, of course, and those are the ones that make headlines. The best that can be said is that if you can afford to buy the finest works by the most prominent artists, and you have first-rate professional advice, you have a reasonable chance to make a decent return. Otherwise, investor beware. Owning art is one of the great attractions of wealth, but you should never mistake it for a great investment. Then why is buying art a great idea? Simply because to own a work of art is its own reward. You can experience art in museums, but it will not enhance your life nearly as much as living with it every day. Nor will it require of you the focus that should be part of the decision to exchange your hard-earned money for an artist's work. As a collector, you will be part of a community that includes artists, curators, gallerists, and other collectors with shared interests. Equally important, each object you buy can be a catalyst for learning. That too is life-enhancing. As soon as I could afford to buy art, I started to collect modern Chinese ink paintings. My mentor in the field was a British scholar/collector/dealer named Hugh Moss, who I met through my Shanghainese friend, Jimmy King. Hugh divided his time between Old Surrey Hall, a vast pile in Surrey with Elizabethan antecedents, and a scholarly retreat on a sparsely populated hillside in Hong Kong. He styled himself a modern Western reincarnation of a Chinese literatus. Historically, the literati were a class of scholar/officials who played prominent roles in Chinese culture and often served in high government posts. They collected meticulously crafted furniture of simple design, brush pots, ancient jade artifacts, snuff boxes and 'scholar's rocks'—unusually shaped stones thought to embody nature's mysterious forces. The literati tradition of landscape painting persisted even after the Communist revolution and Mao's Great Leap Forward. It was the modern expression of that tradition I focused on. There was much that drew me to the genre. I was fascinated that the artists had classical training and technical skill, while their growing exposure to Western influences was encouraging them to experiment with scale, with color, and with abstraction. … I liked the hanging-scroll format of these works, because it let me readily change the paintings I had on display and experience them with fresh eyes. (The Chinese would no more show the same painting all the time than we would play the same music again and again.) Conveniently for me at that early stage in my career, the prices were modest, yet at the same time the genre was so rarified that I could be one of a handful of serious collectors and have access to the best material from the leading dealers. I was not expecting these ink paintings to be good investments, nor did they prove to be. But I stayed with them, accumulating more than fifty over the course of a decade. When I was finally ready to move on, I donated the bulk of the collection to the Harvard University Art Museum, whose senior curator, Robert Mowry, was building perhaps the finest institutional collection in the US. By the 1990s, my interest in art shifted to China's ancient traditions—what my then muse, now wife Alexandra Munroe called a step 'forward into the past.' Hugh Moss again played a pivotal role. 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Wen Fong, then head of Asian art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was generous with his advice, and I made the Met my standard. When a dealer or an auction house had an object that I found intriguing, I would go to the Met and see if they had a better example. If they did, I would pass. As a result, I bought only a handful of objects each year. This pace suited me well. While I enjoyed living with these works, which often combined physical beauty and spiritual power, they were also a challenge. Fakes were not uncommon, and even top dealers could occasionally be fooled. I felt a need to know why and how they were made and what they signified, lessons that often took time to absorb. … Part of the reason I responded to Buddhist art was the connection between Buddhist and Stoic philosophical systems. Both encourage the cultivation of virtue, though one approach focuses on spirituality, the other on rationality. Both emphasize mindfulness, which Buddhism seeks through meditation; Stoicism through concentration, focus, and elimination of distractions. The Stoic concept of impermanence and change echoes the Buddhist idea of detachment. Neither philosophy is incompatible with worldly splendor, provided it occupies a moderate share of one's psychic space. Seneca was among the wealthiest men in Rome and the most influential of Stoic philosophers. The Buddha was a prince who renounced worldly goods for an ascetic life and is always depicted in simple robes. In his pantheon are bodhisattvas, who are typically portrayed in elegant, princely garb with elaborate jewelry. My favorite bodhisattva is Vimalakirti.. (He) lived lavishly and had a passion for debate. When Buddha's other followers criticized Vimalakirti's style of life, he argued that they were seeing only the surface of things and echoing a conventional understanding of wealth and poverty. In contrast, he believed in 'non duality'—the idea that one could be fully engaged in the world, could enjoy material possessions without becoming attached to them, and find true wealth in spiritual insight, compassion, and wisdom. … My expectation about China's economic growth, and the demand it would stoke for the nation's cultural icons, proved correct. The value of my collection has probably increased fivefold. Five times sounds like a fine return, but it is far less than the stock market returned over the same period. Since I have no intention of selling, that doesn't matter very much to me anyway; what did matter was that great objects were no longer 'coming out' of China, and the window of opportunity to add to my collection closed. I adapted quite radically, stimulated by seeing some extraordinary private collections of time-based media, video art, and the intersection of art and technology. My focus shifted from the past to the here and now, from objects to experiences, and from a category with reasonable investment prospects to one with little financial upside. It struck me that video was the natural language of young people, of a whole generation that gets most of its information from screens, and does most of its communicating on devices. Some artists were doing very innovative work, enabled in part by rapidly changing technology ranging from cameras that make a thousand images a second, to facial recognition software, to artificial intelligence, to virtual reality. Other artists were basing their work on video games, often with an ironic critique of the aggressiveness and gender stereotypes they embody. While I had enjoyed learning the history, now I enjoyed getting to know artists. I found that I had a good rapport with many of those I met and quite a few have become real friends. Doug Aitken has been aptly described as the best dinner company the art world has produced. He has surfer dude good looks, boyish curiosity about virtually any topic you introduce, and the charm and skill of an accomplished raconteur. He resists the confines of the museum and is eager to project his art into unexpected places. This penchant for the unexpected is central to a work in my collection, Migration, set in a series of cheap motel rooms reminiscent of B-movies. The motels are mostly in desolate industrial settings in a landscape devoid of people. Into each motel room, he introduces a different species of wild animal. A horse stares in bewilderment at a TV set, a beaver frolics in a bathtub, a mountain lion attacks a pillow as if it is his prey, a buffalo overturns a lamp and crashes a telephone to the floor. 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I have long felt that if video art is to offer the kind of immersive experiences the artists intended, a new kind of cultural institution is needed—a hybrid between a museum and a performing arts venue. As a venture philanthropist, I am excited to help create such an institution. I have taken a giant step by acquiring a 40,000-square-foot venue in Manhattan's Lower East Side, which we are calling Canyon. It will incorporate the latest technology, and it will showcase both established masters and exciting new talent. I hope it will become a 'must see' destination for lovers of contemporary art. It will be open in the evening to attract new, younger, and more diverse audiences, drawn by the dramatic, experiential nature of its exhibitions. (Excerpted with permission from The Stoic Capitalist: Advice for the Exceptionally Ambitious by Robert Rosenkranz, published by Bloomsbury; 2025)
Hindustan Times
38 minutes ago
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ChatGPT isn't just writing for us - it's changing how we talk, and you might not even realise it
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The Print
39 minutes ago
- The Print
Tata Sons holds first board meet after Air India plane crash
Tata Sons will be working with its majority shareholder Tata Trusts for furthering the relief efforts to those affected in the tragedy, they said. Chandrasekaran updated the board about the relief efforts and other aspects undertaken by the group since then, as per sources in the know. Mumbai, Jun 26 (PTI) Tata Sons held its first board meet after the Air India plane crash, where chairman N Chandrasekaran apprised the group leadership about the tragedy. The nine-member board, which oversees operations of over 100 companies in the salt-to-software group, also paid condolences to the deceased at the meeting. At least 270 people, including all but one of the 242 passengers and crew members on board the Ahmedabad-London Gatwick flight AI-171, were killed after the Boeing Dreamliner crashed soon after take-off on June 12. Tata group, which owns Air India, has declared a compensation of Rs 1 crore to each of the kin of all the deceased. As per reports, Chandrasekaran has taken direct control of Air India's daily operations. PTI AA HVA This report is auto-generated from PTI news service. ThePrint holds no responsibility for its content.
