SoftBank Group founder Masayoshi Son recently expressed his grand vision for the future of artificial intelligence at the annual corporate conference in Tokyo. He asserted that the artificial intelligence revolution is an inevitable historic change and clearly refuted market concerns about an "artificial intelligence bubble." Masayoshi Son believes that those who raise questions about the bubble simply lack a deep understanding of the nature of artificial intelligence and are standing on the wrong side of history.
According to Masayoshi Son’s calculations, by 2040, expenditures on developing and deploying artificial intelligence for global society are expected to reach US$5 trillion per year. Regarding this astonishing figure, Son is quite confident. He believes that if the revenue of artificial intelligence-related industries can eventually account for 20% of global GDP in 2040, then the annual investment of US$5 trillion will be a negligible error compared with the potential benefits.
As a staunch advocate of generative artificial intelligence and large-scale language model technology, SoftBank has actively deployed through large investments in recent years. Masayoshi Son even predicted that true artificial intelligence general intelligence (AGI) will arrive before 2030. Although SoftBank has historically suffered huge losses due to investments in projects such as WeWork, Son's successful cases in discovering early technology giants such as Alibaba still attract attention for his industry judgment.
At this conference, Masayoshi Son also made a bold prediction on the infrastructure needs of artificial intelligence in the future. He said that by 2040, global artificial intelligence data centers will require 3 terawatts of power supply, which is almost twice the current total global power consumption. In order to cope with such a huge energy gap, Son believes that natural gas will be the main energy source in the short term, and nuclear fusion technology will replace traditional nuclear power in the future, becoming a more cost-effective and environmentally friendly alternative.
Masayoshi Son outlined a profound blueprint for the transformation of human society: by 2040, approximately 100 trillion artificial intelligence entities will emerge around the world, and they will dominate social operations. Human society will transform from "people-centered" to "artificial intelligence-centered". In his speech, Masayoshi Son emphasized that the era will eventually come when humans are no longer the most advanced form of life on earth. Regardless of the outcome, this technological change is unstoppable.