• Earlier this week, key OpenAI investor Son said the AI revolution is up to “50x bigger” than the dot-com internet frenzy at the beginning of the millennium.
• Anthropic said Thursday it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development.
• Anthropic and OpenAI have already submitted confidential paperwork for public listing, and their IPOs are targeted for sometime this year.

SoftBank’s (SFTBY) chief executive officer, Masayoshi Son, reportedly believes AI could reach the superintelligence level in the next couple of years and now expects the timeline to be around two years, backtracking from a previous claim of up to 10 years.

In a CNBC interview, Son noted that OpenAI’s next model will be built by AI itself rather than by engineers, because humans will no longer be smart enough.

“So once that happens, [the] model generates [the] next model ... and it’s going to be exponentially smarter than all of us. That’s a superintelligence,” Son told CNBC. “So that’s going to happen to all the other major models.”

SoftBank Deeply Invested In AI

Earlier this week, Son said the AI revolution is up to “50x bigger” than the dot-com internet frenzy at the beginning of the millennium. However, he did not rule out the possibility of an AI correction, citing the 1929 Wall Street crash.

SoftBank is among the top players driving global growth in AI infrastructure and technology. Son’s firm is the second-largest investor in the Sam Altman-led OpenAI and has pledged to invest $500 billion in the U.S. to build data centers and up to €75 billion ($87 billion) in France. 

Anthropic Warning About AI

Son’s comments come on the heels of Anthropic’s warning on Thursday about what could happen “when AI builds itself” amid accelerating model improvement speeds.

“If it were possible to effectively slow the development of this technology to give ourselves more time to deal with its immense implications, we think that would likely be a good thing. But if a slowdown simply lets the least cautious actors catch up technologically, it could leave everyone less safe,” Anthropic said in its blog. 

“We believe it would be good for the world to have the option to slow or temporarily pause frontier AI development to enable societal structures and alignment research to keep up with the advances of the technology.”

Anthropic and OpenAI have already submitted confidential paperwork for public listing, and their IPOs are targeted for sometime this year.

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