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.
