SoftBankSoftBank Group and artificial intelligence research company OpenAI jointly announced on Monday that they have entered into a strategic cooperation agreement. Under the agreement, theSoftBank and its subsidiaries will invest $3 billion a year to use OpenAI's technologyIn addition, the two companies announced the formation of a joint venture called SB OpenAI Japan. In addition, the two companies announced the formation of a 50% joint venture called SB OpenAI Japan, which will specialize in promoting OpenAI's enterprise-grade technology to large Japanese companies.
The partnership will give SoftBank and its subsidiaries access to a number of OpenAI's advanced technologies.Includes ChatGPT Enterprise, OpenAI's API, custom models, and an agent product called Operator.Operator is described as "an agent that performs tasks for users on the web," such as planning vacations and filling out forms. In addition, SoftBank will gain access to OpenAI's newest agent feature, Deep Research, which OpenAI says is capable of performing multi-step analysis on the web.SoftBank has consolidated all of these OpenAI products into one suite of tools called "Cristal Intelligence".
SoftBank's British chip designer Arm, a leading global semiconductor designer acquired by SoftBank in 2016, will also use OpenAI's technology to "improve the company's overall productivity."
The joint briefing on Monday morning was attended by executives from SoftBank, SoftBank Group, OpenAI and Arm. SoftBank said the companies represented at the conference have a combined market capitalization of more than half of the total market capitalization of the Japanese stock market. Masayoshi Son, founder and CEO of SoftBank Group, said at the conference thatHe believes that generalized artificial intelligence (AGI)-that is, AI that meets or exceeds the level of human intelligence on a wide range of tasks-will become a reality within the next 10 years.
Speaking through an interpreter, Masayoshi Son said he believes "AGI will be realized first in large corporations," and emphasized that it will take "huge amounts of money" to achieve this goal, and that currently "only large corporations have the financial resources to do so. ".
The news of the partnership comes at a time when rumors are swirling that SoftBank plans to lead a new round of funding for OpenAI. According to a previous CNBC report, SoftBank is in talks with OpenAI to raise as much as $40 billion in financing, with a possible valuation of $340 billion (IT Home note: currently about 2.49 trillion yuan). Two people familiar with the matter revealed that Softbank plans to contribute $15 billion to $25 billion.If the financing closes, SoftBank will surpass Microsoft as OpenAI's biggest backer.
The source also revealed that some of the funds may be used to support OpenAI's joint venture with SoftBank and Oracle, the "Stargate" project, which plans to invest billions of dollars in building AI infrastructure in the United States. Masayoshi Son said at the conference that he looks forward to working with OpenAI, Oracle and other partners to promote the Stargate program.
OpenAI's latest valuation is $157 billion.2022 In late 2022, the company launched its ChatGPT chatbot, kicking off the generative AI boom. In October, OpenAI closed its latest funding round of $6.6 billion, aiming to compete aggressively with rivals like Elon Musk's xAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and Anthropic.
Meanwhile, Chinese startup DeepSeek is rapidly emerging as a new competitor to OpenAI. DeepSeek's app topped Apple's App Store charts this week, and it's attracting attention for its powerful models that can be trained at a much lower cost than those of its U.S.-based rivals. At an OpenAI event in Washington, D.C., CEO Sam Altman said DeepSeek "is clearly an excellent model.
