SoftBank, OpenAI to offer AI services in Japan
Summary
- The 50-50 joint venture will begin offering the services first in Japan and establish a model for global adoption, the companies said Monday.
SoftBank Group and ChatGPT maker OpenAI plan to team up to offer artificial-intelligence services, initially targeting Japanese businesses to lay the groundwork for potential expansion worldwide.
SoftBank Group Chief Executive Masayoshi Son said Monday that the company will assign 1,000 employees this year to the joint venture, SB OpenAI Japan, to kick-start its sales and engineering work.
The 50-50 joint venture will begin offering the services first in Japan and establish a model for global adoption, the companies said Monday. As the first case, the Japanese technology investment company will spend $3 billion annually to use OpenAI’s technology across its group businesses, they said. The joint venture will be a unit of domestic mobile business SoftBank Corp.
Son said that artificial general intelligence, in which computers have human-level cognitive abilities, will likely be realized faster in the world of big corporations than that of individuals because the former has ample financial resources and vast amounts of specific data to train computers.
Just a few months ago, Son predicted that artificial general intelligence, or AGI, would be achieved within two to three years. “I now realize that AGI would come much earlier," he said Monday.
In January, SoftBank Group and OpenAI announced a plan to invest up to half a trillion dollars in AI infrastructure in the U.S., together with other partners such as Oracle and Abu Dhabi-based MGX.
OpenAI was in early talks to raise up to $40 billion in a SoftBank-led funding round that would value the ChatGPT maker at as much as $300 billion, The Wall Street Journal reported last week.
Write to Kosaku Narioka at kosaku.narioka@wsj.com
