The DeanBeat: Why video game companies — and all of us — need to think more about A.I.

I was fascinated to meet Masayoshi Son, the CEO of SoftBank, one of the world’s biggest tech companies, this week at the ARM TechCon conference in Santa Clara, Calif. Son believes in doing really big things. He bought Sprint for $21.6 billion in 2013. That didn’t work out so great at first, but Sprint is on the verge of making some money. Then, in September, SoftBank bought chip designer ARM for $31 billion. And now he’s raising a $100 billion fund with a Saudi Arabian group. I felt like this billionaire was like a character in a video game.

In a small breakfast meeting, Son said he wants to make the Singularity happen. That is the day, coined by futurists such as Ray Kurzweil and Vernor Vinge, when machine intelligence will exceed all human intelligence combined. Son believes that we’ll first see the Internet of Things produce more than a trillion connected devices in the next 20 years. And those devices will lead to the Singularity. To do what he wants, Son confessed that $100 billion isn’t enough.

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Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.