TOKYO, June 24 — Masayoshi Son has a question for anyone who calls the artificial intelligence boom a bubble: it is, he says, an insult to AI. The SoftBank Group founder and chief executive was asked the familiar question at the conglomerate’s annual shareholders’ meeting in Tokyo on Wednesday. It comes up at almost every public appearance now.
The AI surge has driven his fortune to record highs, and the sceptics want to know whether it is a bubble waiting to deflate. Son treated the question itself as the problem.
To talk of a bubble, he said, is an insult to AI. It was not the first time he had reached for elevated language. He 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. He asked 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 decades. For all the noise about frothy valuations, the salient point for Son is that he sees the current moment not as a peak but as the early innings of something far larger.
Shareholders who bought into his vision a decade ago have seen the ride. He is asking them to stay on for another one.
