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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