In 10 years we will have Artificial Intelligence 10,000 times smarter than humans, he said on Friday SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son in a rare public appearance.

Son presented his vision of a world where the super Artificial Intelligence, or ASI as he called it, it will have a special place.

The SoftBank CEO first talked about another term, the general Artificial Intelligence (or AGI) which broadly refers to AI that is smarter than humans. According to Son, this technology, which is potentially 1 to 10 times smarter than humans, will be here in the next 3-5 years, much sooner than he predicted.

However, if AGI is not much smarter than humans “then, we don’t need to change the way we live, we don’t need to change the structure of the human way of life,” Son said – according to a live translation of his remarks by which were in Japanese and took place as part of SoftBank’s annual general meeting of shareholders, as reported by CNBC.

“ASI, however, is a completely different case. With ASI, you will see a big improvement.”

He explained that in the future there will be different ASI models which will interact with each other, like neurons in the human brain. This will create Artificial Intelligence that will be 10,000 times smarter than human genius, Son estimated.

Masayoshi Son with Alibaba’s Jack Ma

Son is the founder of SoftBank and came into the limelight as a result of a profitable investment in Chinese tech giant Alibaba. A technology visionary himself, he created the Vision Fund in 2017 through SoftBank, a huge investment fund whose goal was to support technology companies. Despite the fact that most of his “bets” have been successful, there have also been some that have been crowned with complete failure, such as the one with the company WeWork.

After the Vision Fund posted record losses in 2022, Son said SoftBank would change course and adopt a more conservative “defensive” stance in its investments. In 2023 the Vision Fund recorded new record losseswith Son saying at the time that SoftBank would once again change course and go “on the offensive” as it got excited about AI investment opportunities.

Son has since disappeared from the public eye.

He returned to the spotlight on Friday with his speech which was full of existential questions. “Two years ago – I’m getting old, the rest of my life is counted, but I haven’t done anything yet and I’ve cried so much,” Son said, implying that he feels like he hasn’t achieved anything significant so far.

Fill in how now he has found SoftBank’s mission which is the “evolution of mankind”. He also stated that he now discovered the meaning of his own life.

“Why was SoftBank founded? Why was Masa Son born? It may sound strange to you, but I think I was born to implement ASI. And I say this very seriously,” he said.