AGI could arrive much earlier than predicted, says SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son

New Delhi,UPDATED: Feb 4, 2025 12:28 IST

The anticipation of the arrival of artificial general intelligence (AGI) has been growing steadily. While OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently said that AGI is just Twitter hype, his business partner, SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son, has said that AGI will arrive much sooner than he predicted. Son says that as opposed to his earlier prediction, that AGI will become reality in the next two to three years, he now thinks that the tech may arrive “much earlier”, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal.

Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, in a recent post on X, said that AGI is just Twitter hype as of this point in time. While there was a lot of chatter about AGI being deployed by OpenAI as soon as next month, Altman denied the claims, and said that the company has not even yet built AGI.

For the uninitiated, AGI can be understood as the next step to AI, where the tech system is not just performing a task like a human would do, but is also capable of thinking, learning, and adapting like humans. As opposed to AI that we understand right now, AGI is believed to have a wider horizon. It will not be limited to a particular skill, it will have flexible thinking abilities similar to that of a human mind.

Basically, AGI right now seems like the highest goal AI research companies can achieve, that is, building a machine or an AI system that is able to understand, comprehend and react to a variety of problems just like a human would.

The SoftBank CEO said this as he announced a new AI system called Cristal Intelligence in Japan, which the company has released in collaboration with OpenAI. The joint venture, called SB OpenAI Japan, is owned 50-50 by both companies and involves an investment of $3 billion in the project, which is aimed at changing the way businesses work with the help of AI agents.

SoftBank has said that with Cristal Intelligence, AI agents will “automate everyday tasks”. The company also says that it will use the new AI system at its own Arm and SoftBank Corp to “drive innovation and boost productivity across the company.” The company’s press release claims that the AI agent will allow it to “automate over 100 million workflows”.

This is the second partnership that SoftBank and OpenAI announced this month. The first was Project Stargate, which is a new AI company that involves a massive investment of $500 billion over the next four years. An initial $100 billion has already been deployed in the project. At the time of announcing Project Stargate, Sam Altman had announced that the company is aimed to help develop data centres for OpenAI in the United States.