Masayoshi Son calls AI bubble talk 'blasphemy' as SoftBank targets $6.2 trillion valuation

Talk of a bubble is 'blasphemy against AI' says SoftBank's Son

TOKYO, June 24 (Reuters) - SoftBank (9984.T), opens new tab founder and CEO Masayoshi Son told shareholders on Wednesday that artificial intelligence is still in its early stages and any talk of a bubble is "an insult to AI." "I think it's blasphemy against AI if you say it's a bubble," Son said at the Japanese conglomerate's annual general meeting. "It's just the beginning. AI's potential will be unlocked." The AI investment boom has driven up valuations even as investors question the sustainability of the rally, with SoftBank's share price boosted by Son's all-in bet on OpenAI. Son has experienced market booms and busts during his career, including the dot-com bubble and the COVID-19 pandemic, when his ⁠portfolio fell into the "valley of the coronavirus." SoftBank's other investments include robotics and the group is building data centres in the U.S. Tokyo Electric Power Co (9501.T), opens new tab is looking to bring in external capital, and Son said his group was seeking to invest. "If (TEPCO) were to join our group, we would increase power supply and bring AI data centers to Japan," he said. SoftBank has started manufacturing robots at its "physical AI plant" and will make an announcement on the matter soon, Son said without providing additional details. "I think we're the first in the world to have robots manufacturing robots at scale," Son said. The shareholder meeting provides an opportunity for Son to lay out his vision for ⁠the business and field questions from retail investors. Son has said that SoftBank is a golden-egg-laying goose and again returned to that comparison. "Eggs do not lay eggs, the goose lays the eggs," he said. "SoftBank Group is the factory that lays the eggs." He also complained about the gap between the company's market capitalisation of around 37 trillion yen ($229 billion) and the value ⁠of its assets, which total some 74 trillion yen. "How long do I have to fight to convince you that the goose did a good job?" Son asked. The entrepreneur, 68, said he will lead the company into his 70s to bring ⁠about "artificial superintelligence," which he defines as being 10,000 times smarter than a human. "I have become greedier," Son said. "I would like to do more over the next 10 to 15 years. I will stay healthy as long ⁠as I can." One shareholder, who described herself as a "simple housewife," asked Son to nominate her son to the board of directors. "You have great vision and skill," she said. "I would like my son to become like you." "I'll keep that in mind," Son replied. ($1 = 161.5500 yen) Reporting by Anton Bridge; Editing by Thomas Derpinghaus Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab

SoftBank's Son says calling AI a bubble is 'an insult'

At the conglomerate's annual meeting in Tokyo, Masayoshi Son brushed aside the bubble question and asked shareholders for another decade. At SoftBank Group's annual shareholders' meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday, the founder and chief executive was asked, as he is asked at almost every public appearance now, whether the artificial intelligence boom that has driven his fortune to record highs is a bubble waiting to deflate. He treated the question itself as the problem. To talk of a bubble, Son said, is an insult to AI. It was not the first time he had reached for elevated language. Son has previously called bubble talk "blasphemy" and dismissed the people raising it as "not smart enough, period." The man who has bet more of SoftBank's balance sheet on a single thesis than almost any investor alive does not entertain the counterargument so much as wave it away. At the Tokyo meeting, Son told shareholders he intended to keep working into his seventies, asking for another 10 or 15 years to pursue what he calls artificial superintelligence, the stage he believes arrives after artificial general intelligence and solves problems humanity never imagined it could. He has put a number on the scale of the opportunity too. The AI revolution, he told CNBC in Paris earlier in June, is "more than 10x, probably 50x bigger" than the dot-com boom, and the beginning of a technological shift that could run for 50 to 100 years. The boom comparison is the one Son would rather not invite, given his own history with it. The last time SoftBank sat at the top of the Japanese market was February 2000, when the dot-com bubble was about to burst. Within a year, its shares had fallen roughly 90%. This month, SoftBank briefly overtook Toyota as Japan's most valuable listed company for the first time since that peak, before the carmaker reclaimed the spot three days later. What sits behind the confidence is a position of unusual concentration. SoftBank's cumulative bet on OpenAI has reached roughly $64.6bn, giving it an ownership interest of around 13%. To fund the follow-on, the group secured a $40bn bridge loan and has borrowed against the stake at spreads that reflect the risk lenders attach to it. S&P has lowered its outlook on SoftBank's credit, citing the possibility that the OpenAI exposure could weigh on the group's liquidity. None of which appears to trouble Son, who has described the company's posture as "total offence mode" and is recasting it as an AI-era industrial holding company. The agenda on Wednesday reflected the shift. Shareholders were asked to amend the articles of incorporation to add AI, semiconductors, robotics, and data centres to the stated business purposes, a tidying of paperwork to match where the money has already gone. Son's next frontier, he told the room, lies beyond the chips and the models. He named humanoid and industrial robotics, what he calls physical AI, as the next trillion-dollar industry, and predicted that superintelligence would eventually add at least 10% to global GDP. "Almost all human activities," he said, "eventually will be some kind of collaboration with superintelligence and physical AI." The financial logic of that vision will be tested soon enough. A run of mega technology listings is due in the coming months, with OpenAI and Anthropic among the companies that have filed, and SoftBank's standing rests heavily on whether those debuts validate the prices the market has already paid. For now, the man steering the largest single AI wager in corporate Japan has settled on his answer to the bubble question, which is to refuse to dignify it. Whether that is conviction or salesmanship is, in Son's case, a distinction without much of a difference. He has spent a quarter of a century insisting the future was arriving faster than anyone believed, and has been spectacularly right and spectacularly wrong in roughly equal measure. The shareholders who gave him another decade on Wednesday were betting, as they always have, on which it is this time.

Talk of a bubble is an 'insult to AI' says SoftBank's Son

Masayoshi Son, SoftBank's CEO, dismissed concerns about an AI bubble, calling it an "insult to AI" and emphasising its nascent stage with vast potential. He reiterated SoftBank's role as an "egg-laying factory" and expressed frustration over the company's market valuation compared to its asset value. Son, 68, plans to lead the company into his 70s to achieve "artificial super intelligence." SoftBank founder and CEO Masayoshi Son told shareholders on Wednesday that artificial intelligence is still in its early stages and any talk of a bubble is "an insult to AI". "I think it's an insult to AI if you say it's a bubble," Son said at the Japanese conglomerate's annual general meeting. "It's just the beginning. ⁠AI's potential ⁠will be unlocked." The AI investment boom has driven up valuations even as investors question the sustainability of the rally, with SoftBank's share price boosted by Son's all-in bet on OpenAI. Son has experienced market booms and busts during his career, including the dot-com bubble and the COVID-19 pandemic, when his portfolio fell into the "valley of the coronavirus." The shareholder meeting provides an opportunity ⁠for Son to lay out his vision for the business and field questions from retail investors. Son has said that SoftBank is a golden-egg-laying ⁠goose and again returned to that comparison. "Eggs do not lay eggs, the goose lays the eggs," he said. "SoftBank Group is the factory that lays the eggs." He also complained about the gap between the company's market capitalisation of around 37 trillion yen ($229 billion) and the value of its assets, which total some 74 trillion yen. "How long do I have to fight to convince you that the goose did a good job?" Son asked. The entrepreneur, 68, said he will lead the company into his 70s to bring about "artificial super intelligence," which he defines as ⁠being 10,000 times smarter than a human. "I have become greedier," Son said. "I would like to do more over the next 10 to 15 years. I will stay healthy as long as I can." One shareholder, who described herself as a "simple housewife," asked Son to nominate her son to the board of directors. "You have great vision and skill," she said. "I would like my son to become like you." "I'll keep that in mind," Son replied.

SoftBank's Son Shoots for $6.189 Trillion NAV on Promise of 'Super AI'

By Yang Jie and Megumi Fujikawa TOKYO--SoftBank founder Masayoshi Son wants to bring the tech conglomerate's net asset value to $6.189 trillion in the next decade, setting a bold target built on the promise of artificial "superintelligence." Speaking at an annual shareholder meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday, Son acknowledged the ambition of the 1,000 trillion yen goal but said SoftBank has consistently proven its ability to create value. Calling SoftBank a "swan laying golden AI eggs," the veteran investor said the company has multiplied its worth since adopting a strategy built around a theoretical form of AI that surpasses human capability, or AI superintelligence. SoftBank's strategy centers on what Son described as a global shift from algorithm?driven advances to the physical infrastructure needed to run them. The world is moving to "physical ASI," he said, where the bottleneck is no longer model design but the chips, power and data?center capacity needed to operate advanced systems at scale. That aligns with SoftBank's push to become the world's leading AI-robotics company, Son added. Bets on AI, including on ChatGPT maker OpenAI, helped lift the group's stock to an all-time high in early June, placing it in the top ranks of Japan's most valuable companies. Write to Yang Jie at [email protected] and Megumi Fujikawa at [email protected]