SoftBank commits to joint venture with OpenAI, will spend $3 billion per year on OpenAI's tech
SoftBank has committed to spending $3 billion per year for itself and its subsidiaries to use OpenAI's tech, according to a joint announcement on Monday.
The two also announced a new joint venture, billed as "SB OpenAI Japan," which will market OpenAI's enterprise tech exclusively to major companies in Japan.
The deal will give SoftBank and its subsidiaries access to ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI's API, custom models and agent products such as Operator, which it describes as "an agent that can go to the web to perform tasks for you," such as planning vacations and filling out forms. It also will include access to OpenAI's newest agent feature, once it launches: a tool called "Deep Research" which OpenAI says will be able to conduct multi-step analysis on the web. SoftBank branded all the OpenAI products it will use as a suite of tools "Cristal Intelligence."
Arm, the British chip designer acquired by SoftBank in 2016, will also use OpenAI tools to "boost productivity across the company," according to the announcement.
At a livestreamed event early Monday morning, which was jointly held by SoftBank, SoftBank Group, OpenAI and Arm, executives in the audience represented companies that collectively accounted for more than half of Japan's total market capitalization, according to SoftBank.
During the presentation, Son said that he believes artificial general intelligence, or AGI — a vaguely defined benchmark referring to AI that equals or surpasses human intellect on a wide range of tasks — will be a reality in fewer than 10 years.
Son said via a translator that he believes "AGI can be achieved in large enterprise businesses first," adding that to achieve it, "quite the huge amount of money is necessary" and that such funds are