American President Donald Trump welcomed, Tuesday January 21, the enormous investments which will be devoted in the private sector to artificial intelligence through the “Stargate” project. In the United States, as much as $500 billion – over four years – has been pledged by a new consortium called Stargate, a nascent entity that includes Open AI (the creator of Chat GPT), software firm Oracle and investor SoftBank. With the planned construction of dozens of data centers on American territory, the project will be partly financed and piloted by a Japanese billionaire, Masayoshi Son, boss and founder of the Japanese company SoftBank.
This figure is little known in France, but has been followed for 20 years by specialists in Japan. Last November in Tokyo, Masayoshi Son, an entrepreneur from a poor family in southern Japan, mesmerized a room full of technology buffs, financial analysts and journalists during his major annual conference on artificial intelligence, his current favorite.
“Don't you think it would be nice to each have our own personal artificial intelligence agent, just for ourselves, who doesn't just come when we ask for it, but accompanies us constantly. It's going to happen.”
Masayoshi Son, founder of SoftBankJapanese media
The Japanese businessman, a guru who invests crazy sums in international companies in the technology sectors – sometimes with disappointments – is a fan of artificial intelligence from the American Open AI, and in particular the latest one, called “o1 “, an AI that thinks. “It's awesome, it deserves a Nobel Prize. Chat GPT understands by being pre-trained, but 'o1' is a completely new model that redefines what artificial intelligence is”s’enthousiasme Masayoshi Son.
-Always attracted to American companies, the billionaire therefore decided to invest alongside Open AI, to build dozens of data centers in the United States. And he is motivated by a very personal vision of the future of artificial intelligence, which must be endowed with feelings, with sensitivity, in order to make the world a better place. “Artificial Intelligence must not only be ultra-intelligent, because there will be a risk that it will turn into a frightening weaponhe explains. It requires 'artificial ultra-sensitivity'. And if it develops to this stage, the information revolution will bring happiness to humanity, I even really think that this should be the goal. This will be a reality in the coming decade.”
It would be wrong to think that this commitment by Masayoshi Son signals Japan's strong return to the forefront of technology and AI. Even though he is Japanese, this businessman does not pretend to work for his country which, according to him, lacks ambitions and means. “Many here say : 'Let's design a Japanese AI, a homemade AI, let's be creative'. But this actually consists of reducing the specifications, making it smaller, to have similar resultshe denounces. Creativity is an excuse. The reality is that we go small because we don't have the money to buy the integrated circuits, we don't have the electricity required, we don't have the budget.”
Already in 2016, Masayoshi Son saw Donald Trump as an ally, and his allegiance to the re-elected president has only increased: “It’s the beginning of the golden age, we wouldn’t have decided this without your victory”he says. But be careful not to tread too much on the toes of a certain Elon Musk, who hastened to undermine the Japanese by asserting, on his social network “Softbank didn’t have the money” which he claimed to be able to invest.
