SoftBank CEO Says AI 10x Smarter Than Humans Could Be Here in a Matter of Years
While many top business leaders continue to express concern over the unchecked development of AI, the CEO of SoftBank, a Japanese investment company, has a big prediction for its future.
In a rare public appearance to shareholders at the bank’s general meeting on Friday, CEO Masayoshi Son spoke about his desire to create a world powered by artificial superintelligence, or ASI.
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“SoftBank Group has done many things until now that have all been a warm-up for my great dream to realize artificial super intelligence,” Son told shareholders of the Japanese company, per Reuters.
He also said AGI, or artificial general intelligence, which refers to artificial intelligence that is smarter than the human brain, will be here within the next three to five years and that we could see ASI technology reach a level that’s 10,000 times smarter than the human brain within the next 10 years, according to CNBC.
Son’s futuristic comments did not include an actionable plan for how the company plans to step into the space of ASI, but he mentioned that SoftBank would be working to produce robots with AI capabilities that could be used across all sectors and require “immense capital” to complete.
Over the last year, dozens of billionaires and business leaders, including Elon Musk and Richard Branson, have signed letters calling for regulation of the technology despite the positive benefits the advancement in technology could signal.
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“I’m more excited than worried about AI,” Branson recently told Entrepreneur. “I think it’s going to transform people’s healthcare, it’s going to transform operations, it’s going to transform many, many aspects of life.”
SoftBank was up nearly 27% year over year on Friday afternoon.