Loss-making SoftBank ready for counteroffensive with AI, CEO says

So Masa-san has just discovered AI? Always ahead of the curve, that guy (when he's not losing tens of billions of Saudi dollars).

At that event, he also mentioned having a 3-days mental breakdown that left him in tears in October, a disclosure the Japanese media seems to be ignoring. Doubtless his increasingly impoverished investors have been suffering the same kind of trauma.

One bad idea after another.

Don’t know why they don’t tap into foreign telecommunications markets since Japan has a relatively good name internationally. If Singapore and Malaysia can in Australia and successfully, SoftBank could easily grab a market share using existing infrastructure.

The problem is, many "visionary" companies, like wework, uber and the like simply grow like fungi, sucking up investor capital without returning profits. Essentially they are schemes rather than well thought out companies. Son sounds like an addicted gambler who has lost all his savings at the blackjack table and is about to double down.

Maybe it’s soon more an AI implosion when not only few but everyone or many people see and realize that it’s all not working as originally expected. In addition I personally don’t see the point here, if all private devices contain those AI specific chips from Nvidia, Arm or whomever else in the future , but bring the same of the often wrong useless outputs and AI results similar to those I get already now when using external high performance GPU and TPU chips from available cloud services like Colab etc.

So much for billionaires being geniuses.

This is the result of the government deregulating phone contracts that locked people into paying for nothing. I remember buying a phone on a two year contract. Around 30% if the monthly fee was to pay for the phone. After two years I approached them about still paying the 30% for a phone that I had paid for. The staff just looked at me with dismay. I argued with the for 15 minutes as to why I was still paying for a phone that was already paid off. In the end they told me that it connection fees, which was absolute BS. I then told them I wanted to cancel my contract because the phone was already paid for. Then, they told me it would cost me ¥40,000 to cancel my contract. Of course I asked them why and they told me it was a standard cancelation fee. I paid the ¥40,000 and never got another phone contract. I went to a prepaid SIM card and saved myself ¥15,000 a month. Of course, these days they can’t lock you into an expensive contract or charge you stupid fees. Hence, SoftBank is losing money. They still have 20 people working in their branches most of who do nothing all day. They are bloody pirates!

SoftBank invests in something is a sign to invest somewhere else lol

Pass! He love to make bold comments but never provides specifics. And what's up with the turtleneck? Its summer LOL

I quit them years ago thanks to their rates and customer service and "support".

go and get bankrupt greedy guy...

What and when was that M. Son's last great idea ?

Not everyone is like M. Musk.

Went to get a new number and their price seems a bit better and was told I needed to pay 15,000 yen for a bill they said I had 15 years ago. Lol. Walked out. If their business model is like this I can see why they have massive losses. First they didn’t even provide me with the breakdown as to why I owed it or prove it nor did they have a email address I could email to get it corrected. They wanted me to call their customer support and waste my time on hold. Softbank has always been crap.

The AI ship may have sailed. Governments are moving in to regulate and will only white list what they want to permit.

There are better tech products to build - distributed processing versions of current services like search and social media. Low power technologies. Green tech. Fast, eco-build properties designed to cope with extreme temperatures, farming and irrigation tech, and humanoid cybernetics. Frankly, AI is one of the things I would be crossing off my list for a bit, or at least obfuscating it as novel and adaptive processing. But, hey, he's the rich guy. He can do what he wants.