By 2035, we will have a super-AI with 10,000 times the brainpower of the human brain, said Masayoshi Son, SEO of Japan’s SoftBank. The catch is that it will cost as much as 9 trillion dollars and more power output than the entire United States can generate annually. During a presentation to the Future Investment Initiative in Saudi Arabia, he predicted a great and especially expensive future for AI.
Only a handful of countries can cough up such an insanely high investment. But Son thinks nine trillion is practically a bargain. He expects that once developed enough, the AI of the future could generate as much money annually as that initial investment requires.
‘A trillion dollar profit per year’
Looking at it this way, nine trillion is basically small potatoes –assuming everything goes according to plan. Son estimates that deploying such highly developed AI will lead to a trillion dollars in annual profits, but those will go mostly to a small number of companies. Four, he specified. When asked by the interviewer, who was listening incredulously, if Son wanted his bank to be one of those four, the CEO replied, ‘Of course’. Because what else could he say at that point?
SoftBank has a majority stake in British chip player Arm. The bank bought the outfit in 2016 for 32 billion euros and took the company public last year. However, SoftBank held a majority stake of more than 90 percent. Arm is the founder of the architecture behind virtually every smartphone in the world and plans to launch its first AI chip next year. A new division within the company aims to have a prototype ready by early 2025. After starting mass production, this division should fall directly under SoftBank. In that light, it is unsurprising that Son is putting fuel to the fire of the AI hype.
Plenty of Nvidia GPUs needed
Because so much is still possible in the AI field, according to billionaire Son, he also believes that Nvidia is currently not overvalued at all, but rather undervalued. After all, to run the workloads of the future, you need not only 400 gigawatts (more than the annual power production of the US) but also 200 million GPUs. In other words, the market hasn’t quite grasped Nvidia’s profit potential yet. Incidentally, it looked like SoftBank would sell Arm to Nvidia a while back. When regulators brushed that off the table, SoftBank decided on an IPO.
Who will pay for all these investments? How will the necessary power be generated? Who will cool such data centers in what way and will GPUs remain as valuable as they are today or eventually become a household appliance? Those topics were not discussed. Dreaming big is the SoftBank CEO’s motto. With all these superlatives, you would almost overlook the fact that Son has quietly pushed back his timeline for achieving Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) by a few years. Earlier he said it is only three years away, now it’s 2035.
Also read: After Arm adventure, SoftBank acquires British AI firm Graphcore