SoftBank Group is a well-known Japanese multinational investment holding company that has a strong interest in technology unicorn companies. CEO Masayoshi Son was optimistic about many things, some of which became successful products, while others turned into spectacular failures.
Masayoshi Son recently stated at the SoftBank World Business Conference that some form of artificial general intelligence (AGI) will be born in 2030. AGI is often defined as a truly "intelligent" computer algorithm that can think, speculate, and be aware of its own existence in the digital realm, similar to human intelligence.
A true AGI agent, also known as "strong artificial intelligence," can accomplish any intellectual task that biological intelligence can accomplish, just better than humans. AGI will mark a "singularity" moment in technological progress and humanity as a whole, while modern "weak" AI like ChatGPT can only solve (or attempt to solve) specific problems and show no sign of general cognitive abilities.
Masayoshi Son speculates that the upcoming AGI will be able to surpass humans in almost all intellectual tasks because its intelligence will be ten times that of all human intelligence combined. The SoftBank CEO said that even the weak artificial intelligence algorithms mentioned above are already better than humans in some areas.
Son said it was "wrong" to say that artificial intelligence cannot be smarter than humans. AI algorithms can now self-learn, self-train, and self-reference just like humans. The CEO has already been adamant about the potential transformative impact of artificial intelligence on business and society, but now he's offering some kind of timeline for the development of the first (and possibly last) AGI.
Son also provided further development prospects for this nascent AGI, which will become "artificial super intelligence" within 20 years. He said at the meeting that if AGI is ten times smarter than all humans, then super digital intelligence will surpass human intelligence at an astonishing speed of 10,000 times.
SoftBank's leader is clearly pushing for greater funding for artificial intelligence development to turn his AGI dreams into reality. He also said Japanese companies need to be "sober" about the technology's prospects.
The manager said that companies unwilling to invest in artificial intelligence will become "goldfish" and "hallucinators" if they refuse to adopt self-hallucinating chatbots. Masayoshi Son also said that the chips designed by Arm will be the core of this AGI revolution, and most modern weak artificial intelligence services (ab) use NVIDIA GPUs to complete large-scale parallel text computing workloads. SoftBank has owned Arm since 2016.